The reaction to yesterday’s launch of Carrington Build has been overwhelming. We knew we had created something we were proud of, but it’s extremely gratifying to see so many other people excited about it as well.
My post yesterday was pretty long and really only scratched the surface. For example, I didn’t go into details on our pricing structure. Naturally, that is the area where I’ve seen the most questions and confusion, so I’m hoping to clear it up here. We’ll have an official FAQ added to the Crowd Favorite website shortly as well.
We spent quite a bit of time thinking about how best to deliver Carrington Build to the community, and we settled on the following packages to satisfy the following general target audiences:
- Carrington Business theme (for End Users) = $149 This is for bloggers, companies running business sites on WordPress, hobbiests, developers that want to implement for their personal sites, etc. – most people fall into this category. The Carrington Business theme is a fantastic theme that works right out of the box for business sites, and includes Carrington Build to create rich, flexible pages. It supports child themes (it actually includes an example child theme) for easy customization. It also includes documentation, upgrades, usage support and monitored customer forum access for 1 year. I expect there will be many more commercial Carrington Build themes (from us and others) available soon. You can purchase the Carrington Business theme in our store.
- Carrington Build Developer Edition (Single Site) = $499 This is for developers and consultants who are working on paid client projects. The expectation is that this cost will be passed along as part of the project cost – many WordPress professionals fall into this category. This amount is less than 1 day’s development at typical rates and is a unthinkable bargain for the end client (compared to the cost of creating multiple custom page templates, not to mention custom development of a system like Build). This is the edition to purchase if you are going to be making money by implementing Build in a website. It also includes developer documentation, upgrades, implementation support and monitored developer forum access for 1 year. You can purchase the Developer Edition in our store.
- Carrington Build Royalty Edition = $15 or 10%/sale This is for commercial theme and plugin developers who wish to include Carrington Build in their commercial offerings. There are no up-front costs, you simply pay the greater of $15 or 10% of the theme sticker price for each sale. When your themes and plugins do well, we both win. We support our royalty edition partners in our developer forums to make sure their integrations and offerings are the best they can be. Please contact us if you are interested in exploring this relationship.
Hopefully this helps clarify the pricing structure for Carrington Build and the Carrington Business theme. As many people have kindly remarked, Carrington Build isn’t a typical WordPress plugin or theme. It’s a system that took years of experience to define and took over a year to create. I believe it’s one of the biggest projects for WordPress, period. As you can imagine, we have a significant financial investment in it. I believe we have priced Carrington Build fairly, and hope that it is embraced and adopted by the WordPress end user and developer communities alike.
I’m collecting questions to answer in a follow-up Q&A post about Carrington Build. If there is something you’d like to know that I haven’t gotten to yet, let me know (or hit me on Twitter).
This post is part of the project: Carrington Build. View the project timeline for more context on this post.