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.
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This is definitely a quantum leap in WordPress site development.
The price offers are fair.
The work involved on your part must have been overwhelming to create a fully functioning model.
As for me, I will be an early adapter… buyer… 🙂
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Thanks for the clarification. I think the one aspect that is missing is personal use.
I would love to have this on my own site but I do not want to commit to recreating it using the business theme. I simply want to drop it into mine (not sure of the complexity).
The cost of the business theme sounds fair, but buying it just to extract the plugin doesn’t make sense (not that I’m suggesting that).
So, is my only option to pay the developer price?
“Personal use” falls squarely in the “end user” category – purchase the Business theme.
Alex,
I followed you throughout the years. You never ceased coming up with something that I didn’t know I’d want but would want when I saw it.
Congrats to you and your team on the most revolutionary development in years. You came up with the Thesis – or whatever build framework – killer. Now it’s no longer about departments of hook areas to remember and code, it’s all about add, drag, drop and implement with ease. If this gets into WordPress right out of the box, it’s game over. Matt should be offering a mint to you to further develop and implement through WordPress for right out of the box use.
The only real question I have is how does it integrate with existing developments. How easy would it be to add and use on projects that are already in use?
Am still drooling over your work! Wanted to know if there is a way to know if you are able to use the Build in your own theme? I am sure you have had many purchasers, but I would like an opportunity to see their reviews, like ease of use, theme compatibility, etc. Is that possible? Again, great job!
Yes, integrating Build into an existing theme or website is pretty straightforward. We have some documentation available now that will likely be enhanced next week. We have also been doing a few reference implementations as child themes of other popular themes for examples. These resources will all be available to our customers.
the price offers are fair, very useful as well thanks.
-EA
Maybe you can help me out on figuring out which pricing level best applies to this situation.
For the past few months we’ve been working on a similar concept, but nowhere near as advanced. Basically, we’re creating widgetized child themes that we’re planning on selling for popular frameworks (Hybrid, Thematic, Genesis, even Thesis). The goal, like Build, is to modularize content pieces that the client can re-arrange.
We’re planning on selling base versions of these child themes with customization options as an add-on service. Would integrating Build into these child themes fall under the royalty program? Could we sell our child themes with a Build upgrade option under the royalty program?
Or does all of that sound like it falls under the Developer category (even though we’d be mass-selling, hopefully, the base child theme)?
This definitely sounds like a Royalty situation to me.