Lifetime Plan Going Away in Favor of Annual Renewals

We’re working on a change in WPML accounts, aimed to improve sustainability and give you better ongoing support.

Today we offer both yearly and lifetime accounts for WPML. The content of these accounts is identical, except for the renewal terms. Everyone who already has a Lifetime you will keep getting updates and support without any renewal payments, but we’ll stop selling new Lifetime accounts. We’ll also stop offering account upgrades from yearly to Lifetime.

The New Kinds of Accounts and Renewals

The new kinds of accounts that we’ll offer will be:

What Happens With Existing Clients

Your current accounts will continue working normally. Our aim is to make sure that you get what you paid for and the updated pricing doesn’t disrupt your business.

Current Lifetime Account Holders

If you already have a Lifetime account, you keep getting updates and support without any renewal payments. You already paid for it.

Yearly Account Holders

As you’ve noticed, we’re adding a cap on the number of sites that you can build with the lower-cost accounts. You might be asking yourself how can this cap possibly help you and the answer is actually simple.

Today, the majority of WPML clients build several sites. Some clients build dozens and hundreds of sites. We want to give the best possible service to everyone. We love clients who build many sites with WPML and we also love clients who only need WPML for one or two sites.

By separating the account types, we can assign the right resources to both kinds of clients. If you only build a few sites, you don’t want to wait in line for support while we handle the “heavyweight” clients. And, if you’re building many many sites, you typically need different kinds of support than a developer who’s just starting out with multilingual sites.

So, by knowing who needs what, we can improve the support for everyone.

Also, we believe that if you’re using WPML to build 30 sites per year, you can afford higher support cost than a developer who uses WPML for one site and that’s it.

So, after this lengthy introduction, here’s the plan.

If you have a current Blog account, you’ll be able to stay on that account or upgrade to the new Standard account on our expense. Mind you, next year’s renewal will be $59 instead of $21.

If you have a Multilingual CMS account, you can choose to move to the new Standard account or the new Agency account. The Standard account will cost you $59/year and allows to build only 3 sites. The Agency account costs $119 per year and allows to build unlimited sites.

Higher Cost and Higher Value

There’s no doubt, this change increases the cost of WPML. Together with upping the cost, we’re also doing our very best to increase the value that you’re getting.

A New Advanced Translation Editor

In the last year, we’ve been working on a brand new translation editor for WPML, which drastically improves translation accuracy and speed. We call it WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor.

This translation editor will have:

• High accuracy segmentation for convenient translation units
• Your own Translation Memory
• Your own Translation Glossary
• Built in spell checker
• Machine translation which you can run on each translation unit

To make a long story short, the new translation editor in WPML is at the same level as the best translation tools on the market. It’s something that translators typically pay hundreds of dollars for and you’re getting it as part of WPML.

Real-Time Support

We hate it when clients need to wait hours, or sometimes a whole day, to get help from our support. In the very near future, we’ll be adding real-time support to WPML. It’s going to remain a ticket system, like it’s now, but you’ll need to wait up to a couple of minutes and a supporter will take your ticket “live”. You’ll see when a supporter is reading your ticket and replying to you and the supporter will wait for your reply before moving on to the next ticket.

Why? Because we’ve checked and we see that a lot of the support tickets need a bit of back and forth for us to understand what the problem is. We realize that it’s frustrating for you to wait several hours, just to get a reply that asks you for more details. If a supporter and you work together, using live updates, to understand the problem, we’ll be able to resolve most issues in a matter of minutes.

Of course, if we need to take a copy of your site for debug, we’ll need to get back to you a bit later. However, the vast majority of the support tickets don’t need this longer debug and shouldn’t wait in that queue.

WPML’s Features in the Coming Months

Besides a (much) better translation editor and live support, we’re working on a number of things that you’ve asked.

• Gutenberg integration – Gutenberg will soon ship as part of WordPress and WPML will be ready for it. The upcoming release of WPML already resolves all issues with the current version of Gutenberg (and there are a few). The next release will also use Gutenberg’s blocks API to offer easier translation for Gutenberg texts (we can’t do this yet as the API is still evolving).
• Media Translation for WPML’s Translation Editor and professional translation – The new Media Translation is a complete rewrite, making it possible to upload replacement images for translated content. I’ll write a lot more about it very soon.
• Better and faster word count – Many sites need translation, but it’s hard today to know how much time it will take and how much it will cost. We’re rewriting the word count tool to cover all content types (including content from page builders) and produce the word count quickly and accurately.
• Taxonomy slug translation – You’ll be able to translate the slugs of taxonomy terms.

Of course, our top priority is on stability, compatibility and performance. It goes without saying that we only add new features when existing features and integrations are stable. Our compatibility team (of 6 developers) works closely with the authors of leading theme and plugins to ensure ongoing compatibility. The dev team always prioritizes stability and security issues. We know that if your site has a problem, it’s a lot more important than a shiny new feature that we’re working on.

When

We’re working on changing the accounts system right now. The change will be ready sometime during May (it’s still “in progress” so we don’t have an exact date yet).

You can upgrade your current accounts to Lifetime now and lock-in future updates and support. You probably know that we’ll prefer to have more clients with yearly accounts than Lifetime clients, but it’s your right.

Why WPML Needs to Make This Change

Today WPML is doing fine. We have strong development and support teams and we’re living up to our obligations. Every year, we have more clients and more websites to support. Our support team started with just one person and today includes over 35 people, speaking 10 languages. If we sell more Lifetime accounts, at some point in time we will not be able to afford the support that our clients need. Annual renewal payments for updates and support will prevent us from running into this situation. More clients » more websites » more supporters.

“What’s in It for Me If I Pay for Yearly Renewals?”

Of course, there’s a benefit for us when you pay us yearly renewals. This way, we get ongoing revenue which we’ll use for the ongoing development and support for you.

If you give it a second thought, you’ll notice that there’s a benefit for you as well. When you pay us for yearly renewals, you know that we’ll fight to make you happy. After all, if we can’t make you happy and you no longer see the value of WPML for your business, we know that you’ll cancel the renewals. When we need to make you happy every year, it’s like getting mini-married again every year. Wouldn’t it be fun if your spouse kept courting you again and again every year? That’s how we want to be for you :-)

Ideas? Thoughts? Questions?

Please leave your comments, tell us if we’ve missed anything and we’ll get back to you.