dev77

@jeremy-pollock

I think that as long as you keep Genesis updated so that it continues to work with new versions of WP, that is all that is needed. I don’t think anyone is looking for new features.

As long as the Gen middleware and the Studio Press themes can use the block editor I don’t see any major reason why you need to run to FSE… I tried FSE with the current WP 2020x themes and didn’t like it… and to be honest did not see a use-case for it in our shop.

I’m not sure WPE understands what a ‘good thing’ they have with Genesis and SP. If your company decides to EOL Genesis, there is a huge part of your customer-base that are going to run to another platform… (my people like Astra) and WPE will not be the first place they (we) look to for goods and services in the WP space.

I know that I were running WPE (and I’ve run companies much larger than WPE) I’d be working my tail off to develop Genesis and keep it current as possible so as not to lose such a large (and happy) customer base.

Without Gen. and SP all you are is a hosting company… a very good for sure, but there is nothing that really distinguishes you from the many, many other really good hosting companies.

I don’t know what kind of business-savvy WPE has, but I would hope there is someone on board with an MBA or the equivalent experience who understand a simple fact that applies to all businesses: It is far, far, far easier to keep an old customer than to get a new one.

Genesis can be a ‘golden goose’ for you… and you need it because you don’t have any other ‘geese’ on your farm.

Without Genesis, you are have to compete with many, many other ‘upscale’ hosting companies… and there is not much room for dynamic growth in that market, from what I can see… and I’ve been the software arena since I wrote my fist line of IBM ALC code in 1973 for H. Ross Perot’s EDS company (which puts me at an age close to dead!)

Anyway, thanks for contributing here.

1. Running Woo on WP on Pair.com shared hosting with a free theme and free plugins is about $96 a year.

Shopify’s cheapest plan is $468 a year.

1. I’m hoping you are right and that some new upgrade of WP does not ‘brick’ our Genesis site forcing us to go to Astra or Kadence or whatever the “hot theme of the day” is.
2. Yes we all have our own standards for tooling. Our clients do not like the subscription model. They are happy to pay once for the theme but expect to receive security or operational updates for life, but not new features.

If new features are offered for an upgrade price, fine. But our clients don’t want to pay a yearly subscription for features that they don’t want or need. Bottom line our client base is basically very frugal… aka struggling startups.

Our e-com sites start at $2,000 and go up from there depending on how many products we have to input. Adding an extra $50 per year renewal fee (what Astra charges) for five years (projected life of site)… $250 is more than our clients want to pay when they are not convinced there is any real value in this fee for them.

We’ve been doing sites for our particular client base (mostly small book publishers) for 14 years now and I’ve tried to pitch the subscription model, but it just does not fly in our market. I hope it does in your market.

YMMV