Love to see you around and (hopefully) well!
Keep me posted if there’s anything I can do to help.
I like the idea of add ons mostly so they can help you fund ongoing development. It wouldn’t be fair from us to expect you to work on this for free. Even though (some of us) bought the pro version, if not new users come around to purchase it, you’re stuck on a losing situation.
I wish you have a lovely holiday!
I’ve said this already but no plugin that’s essential to your business should be sold on a one time fee.
Please just make it recurring payments every year. Buying it gets you a one or two year support time. Then say 50-100 USD per year. Usually first time buyers are more support intensive than old users. Old users question/demands will rather be helpful/showing up actual bugs not simply not understanding or plainly not reading documentation.
Just for scale. I pay 750 Euros a year for quaderno.io just for handling invoices which is a super complicated subject to get right.
In 2015 I paid around 4000 Euros for a programmer to set up a basic invoice creation with another now defunct invoice service and create/find all those two factor of location needed proofs that match for EU regulations on vatmoss now called OSS. In a few years this will need to be changed to write e-invoices and most likely all invoices will need to be uploaded daily to your countries tax department (2028 EU rule, likely to be copied by many countries worldwide). At least there is no pre clearance of those invoices coming like for companies in Italy or Poland because that’s even more painful.
You’re clearly on a different segment than I am, sorry for being honest. I’d not be able to afford those costs.
I’d rather have new add ons made available from time to time or a cheaper subscription for priority support/bug fix requests, so I could cancel my subscription if unable to fund it.
Maybe some people can afford 750 or 4000 euros per year on something like that but I’d be out, sorry.
One of the things that made me choose s2Member was its affordability.
There’s no other way for me. EU regulations are very strict, most people don’t follow them correctly but it’s closing in now since they extend the scopes of OSS to more and more businesses (distance selling since last year, so not only digital products). If invoice handling costs me 10% of turnover I still have to swallow it. I cannot manually do it because my average invoice is around 14euros.
I am sorry you have to keep up with those costs but I am also happy you can afford them. If you are spending that much you likely make much more. 
I thought about using fiverr for that in the past but my time isn’t valuable enough so I just process things manually when the plugin doesn’t handle them properly.
I hope the notification below I have been getting for the past week or two doesn’t mean they’ll discontinue the legacy integration we use. 
Or that at least existing subscriptions continue to work. Then we just stop accepting PayPal for new subscriptions. 
I’ve heard nothing from PayPal about anything being discontinued. I know PayPal Checkout is newer, but s2Member seems to keep on working.
Nice to see you here.
I don’t know how many users does this plugin have and I don’t know if it be worth it four you to create an subscription plan for current users.
I think I paid 60€ for this plugin, my site is so simple and I use it in a single page. I do not want to replace it with a sophisticated plugin and I’ll be happy to pay a fee to asure the plugin will keep working in next Stripe and Paypal releases.
I guess that, as many others here, I want a simple and cheap plugin so, I don’t know whether it will be worth it for you to create an cheap fee subscription.
I hope you’ll keep this alive
Best regards,
Carlos
My suggestion would be for Cristian to do the following:
For new members: change the Pro version of s2Member from a one-time payment to an annual fee.
For existing members: send a survey asking whether they’d be prepared to start paying an annual fee (and what sort of amount they’d be prepared to pay) to support the ongoing maintanance and future development of s2Member.
With the above 2nd suggestion, I think any annual fee for existing members would need to be optional, because they’ve already paid for “lifetime” access. However, I’m hoping that at least some existing members would be prepared to start paying an annual fee. For example, from my point of view, I’d much rather start paying (say) $20 per year and be confident that s2Member is going to continue working, rather than constantly worry that at some point s2Member is going to break and I’ll need to move everything to another membership plugin (which would be a massive hassle, and would be likely to cost far more than an annual fee to s2Member).
I’m happy to pay an annual fee if it means s2Member’s future is secure. But just because everyone is paying more does not automatically mean that anything will improve.
One of my main concerns is that s2Member has not kept up with PayPal’s changes. How long will it be before s2Member Pro’s legacy PayPal implementation stops working? Are there any plans to upgrade s2Member to the new PayPal Checkout before it’s too late? Would an annual fee get the ball rolling? Or would I just be paying more until s2Member stops working?
I’m thinking along those lines…
I would not charge them more for their Pro updates, since they already got those for the lifetime of the product.
My idea is to have a subscription for a bundle of additional new addons, not the Pro addon. Existing Pro users can subscribe to that new bundle if they want.
And of course, anyone is welcome to give a donation to help the project, whenever and as much as he wants.
Yes, I plan to integrate with the new PayPal Checkout, and Stripe Checkout, too.
How do we donate? I like the idea (@CookingFat suggested the 20 and I like it) of 20 euros or 20 dollars per year to have access to a VIP session of the forum, where we might have a slight priority with issues/suggestions but without expectations they’d be resolved, of course, more like an incentive for people to join and perhaps giving you better numbers and some help.
On top of that we can buy add ons as you release them.
That’s an interesting idea. I’ll think about it. 
The donation link is https://s2member.com/r/donate/
It’s in s2’s admin pages, in the sidebar, the heart icon. I guess I’ll need to make it more clear/obvious. 
Your images aren’t showing on my install. If you didn’t include them in your plugin files they might be hosted somewhere I didn’t list as an allowed source.
Also, I don’t use those pages often I manage my users on the user list.
Thanks for the showing me that! I didn’t know it didn’t show for some… I’m using FontAwesome icons there. I thought WP loaded that, since I see it used often. I’ll have to improve that.
Oh, I only use native fonts (arial etc) to make my site WAY faster. But the admin pages should show custom fonts, though.
It IS an image and it IS hosted locally and I can even see it when hovering with my browser’s dev tools, but it won’t render there for some reason.
Example below:
/wp-content/plugins/s2member/src/images/brand-kb.png
You are using ::before that might be interfering or breaking something, not sure.
Those images where the ones s2 had before I switched to using FontAwesome there (via styles), when I started changing the admin pages.
I think I’ll just switch back to normal images again in a future release.
Ah! Makes sense.
It should be showing on my interface though. Anyways, now you know it does not. I can always test things, you can send me a private message. And sorry if the conversation ended up going out of topic.
