Thanks for your reply. I’ve added explanations to some of the specific points you made. It wasn’t my intent to start a debate but to merely provide for consumers to perform informed price comparisons. Yes, stacks prices are generally increasing. While any price increase is displeasing, only by looking to external comparisons can you evaluate if those increases are with or without merit.
Shouldn’t Stacks cost more than a theme? More complex, more users, way wider support audience.
Yes. I think there’s high value in Stacks and Isaiah should probably charge more for it. The cost entry barrier to stacks that Rapidweaver adds – you need RW to use Stacks – imposes a price ceiling for Stacks. Stacks is a platform within a platform.
So why does a theme, or a stack, cost more than the RW base product or even the plugin class dependency which it’s built in? How does the ‘cost per use’ argument stand up there?
This is a bit similar to the prior question but requires a more nuanced answer. Stacks, like all software, benefits from marginal distribution costs. Isaiah develops Stacks once. That’s sunk cost. It doesn’t cost him a lot more to distribute it to 1,000 people than it does to distribute it to 10 people. As Isaiah adds more users the cost of each additional user added trends toward zero. Thus, the more people who use Stacks, the better the margin. Everyone who uses stacks has Stacks. Not everyone who uses Stacks will have Nick’s Photos 2 stack. Thus, stack developers need to make more per customer because they have fewer customers than Isaiah who has fewer customers than Realmac. As to why one stack might cost more than the other, that’s just features, complexity, developer reputation, and market demand.
I think there are many more RW/Stacks user producing awful-mediocre sites than anything that could be described as ‘boutique’ or customised. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, there are artisans/craftspeople in this space who have real skills, but in the broad, have you SEEN some of the sites that are linked to in the forums when ppl ask for help? Hmmmm. Your use of ‘customised’ may be valid but but not always in a good way. Your use of ‘boutique’, and what it infers by way of expectation doesn’t land for me.
True. And this is true for more than just Stacks and stacks. Buying the best pair of football cleats does not make you the best football player. Since that’s true, are the cleats not worth the money in the marketplace to those professionals who might capitalize on their features? Or, should the cleats be cheaper because not all the people who use them are professional football players because they wear them. Surely, people are accountable for their capabilities within a practice.
Just do a search on this forum for the number of ‘Client wants …’ posts followed by recommendations of ‘have you tried…’, swiftly followed by “well, it does some of what I want but I can’t figure out how to get it to…”. Not my idea of boutique or ‘Truly custom’ …
Are you suggesting this is unique to Rapidweaver? If yes, I encourage you to visit other forums, be they Blocs, Wordpress, or Squarespace. In fact, you can find plenty of similar dialogue in Cloudflare, AWS, and Adobe forums. The condition you’re describing isn’t unique to any software or developer platform. It’s certainly not unique to Rapidweaver. But, I agree. If those other products deliver more capabilities for better prices, you should leverage those other products. Competition is great like that.
I’m not making the argument that anyone should choose one tool over another or trying to influence preference. I simply provided multiple examples evidencing that stacks prices aren’t out of line with competing products for Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, or something else. That’s it.
