Rated 1 out of 5 stars

by Ratzlepuff on Aug. 7, 2019 ·

After restarting thunderbird a new tab opened with a flashing "buy license -33% off" icon and text saying this addon requires a license to work and the free / basic version has become a 14 days trial now.

The developer definitely put hard work into this addon. But the fact that the addon already had a PRO version before, which I didn't needed because I was satisfied with the basic options, makes this a bad move. Especially because it was from one day of another.

Last but not least, in my expectation the addons here(!) should work and not being time limited trial of paid software. But this line is not part of the rating just my extra two cents.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (2.1.1). 

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 7, 2019 ·

Thanks for your opinion. To keep using the "free as in beer" version perpetually you can roll back to version 2.0 (released last December), and disable Add-on updates. Unfortunately, I cannot update that version for Thunderbird 68 for free anymore, but as long as you stay with Thunderbird 60 you should be fine.

By the way it's not 33% off, the standard license costs 33% of the pro license (5 bucks, so with taxes around 50cents / month), so it's actually 66% off compared to "pro", I updated the website today to make that clearer - I know that's a lot of money, so it only makes send if you use the Add-on's functionality regularly and save enough time through it to justify such an expense. I believe if it saves you 1 minute per workday that would be a time saving of 20 minutes / month - if you earn less than 5 bucks / hour it would not be worth it.

The license is annual because Mozilla pushes down breaking changes (I had about 3 man-months of work to update my Add-ons for 2020) which will make sure that Add-ons will not work anymore without major work by the developers. The income from Pro-licenses did not reflect the amount of work (I would have ended up working well below minimum wage) and I do have a family I need to feed.

Transitioning my existing users was a necessary risk I had to take. Consider the 7 years of free support and development I supplied (since I took over development in 2012) as a parting gift. Unfortunately, I do not keep track so I cannot know how long an individual user has used it or how much they have benefited.

Also, discouraging Add-on authors by downvoting their work will not increase the amount of useful software on the site. Should you decide to remove SmartTemplate⁴ and go with the update to Thunderbird 68, you will notice a lot of "free as in beer" Add-ons go away. I am actively encouraging other developers to look into monetizing their Add-on in order not to walk away from an ever breaking platform. We can see what happened with many many useful Add-ons after Firefox 57 deprecated classic add-ons. We are just at the bottom of the totem pole.

PS: I see you switched to ReplyWithHeader, thanks for finding an alternative that works for you - you may as well mention it in your review text - I encourage all my users who prefer their developers to work for nothing to check it out!