Envato Hosted: investing in the future of ThemeForest

I think it’s a grey area.

You can’t purchase Envato hosting without a theme, so either the hosting is attached to the theme or the theme is attached to the hosting. However, this is another question, which does not need answering since themes on Envato Hosted already accepted the conditions.

Most of our customers are people setting up websites for clients. I don’t know if it’s the case for others as well.

It is not extra 12$, or JUST 12$.

I think that most of you here, miss completely the point. The lifetime value of a client is been increased. It is 2$ / month extra, that means, 24$ extra. 54+24, which will also allow authors to sell their extra Support Option, if they want.

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Also, it increase the custom LTV to Envato, which means, if you are a rockstar and you know how to do it, you will earn more than others, if you manage to convert the client to multiple payuts, because most will go ahead and buy a second theme for their web site and use it to update the site.

Consider that a gift, it is clear that only the strong will survive, but when you are a business, you have to learn how to pivot and adapt, so you can earn more.

There are business who do that, by buying a new license for each of their customers, with HUGE success.

Not may, that is what Envato is doing, for every single client, because the License is registered to users, if user wants to transfer away for his hosting.

Hey folks,

Jumping in to do give some general clarifications and answers.

Our man @SpaceStockFootage pulled out his red pen and went to town on the landing page :smile: I took them to the Envato Hosted Team, their reply:

As we’ve noted above, this is a soft launch that’s still very much in the early stages. We have a lot of learning to do around all aspects of Envato Hosted and we’re excited to work with our initial group of authors and internal product teams on the best flow, ui, ux and everything in between.

You’ve brought up some good insights and these are all things we’re hoping to learn and test and gain data about as we move Hosted forward. Keep the insights and experience coming!

At this stage we’re aiming to run some experiments and establish a fair and scalable model for how Hosted will operate. Once we’re through this phase, we’ll look to invite more and more people to be a part of the program. When we do scale, we’ll be looking far more closely at the quality of an author’s products than the amount of them that they’ve happened to sell.

We’ve partnered with a company to do the hosting :slight_smile:

Under the current model, Envato Hosted is taking care of theme and hosting support. We’ll be working with authors to ensure we understand their themes and ensure they are getting feedback about their themes. This means authors can spend less time on support and more time developing great new features and products. We’ve built a new team for this model who have some serious WordPress know-how.

We want to give our client’s full control of their hosting, with the caveat this is still managed WordPress so we fully manage and protect WordPress itself. Our team ensures that WordPress is working 24/7, and handle the entire core upgrade process. A user receives sFTP access after your third payment. Client access to backup and a staging system is coming in the next few weeks, and PHPMyAdmin will follow after that

Honestly, it’s too early to tell. There’s some interesting ideas here, but we’re still learning how this model is going to operate, but we’re certainly not taking anything off the table.

Whilst the idea is to ultimately build something that scales, we’re certainly not planning on forcing anyone to do anything.

Finally, on the topic of revenue…

The ultimate aim here is to produce something that’s a win for authors and for Envato. To that end, Envato and the authors involved are having a lot of conversations to help us understand the costs of providing this new type of service. Setup, ongoing support, installation- the hosting itself. All of these are things we need to understand to if we’re going to decide who gets what.

The only way that this project will be successful is if it’s a win-win for all the different parties involved. We’re working together here, If one group wins at the cost of another party failing, then we don’t really have a sustainable offering.

I’ll be jumping in to provide some clarification and answers as required.

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The marketplace will be inside WordPress, really soon :wink:
Plugins will have a page, just like the WP.org plugins, which will list the codecanyon plugins and users will buy inside their dashboard, anything premiun through a nice UI.

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@matthewcoxy how authors can apply for this?

I would guess you are chosen to be in it, no applying, they will choose authors who meet a specific criteria so they can run the trial as best as they can before launching.

@matthewcoxy Hi Matt, can you please reply to me?

@SW-THEMES and @rayoflightt

We’re not at the stage where we have an applications process. As we say above, at the end of this period, we’re hopeful that we’ll be in a position where we can start considering expressions of interest from more authors who want to get involved in the project.

@matthewcoxy this is an excellent idea. I was planning to do this on our own for few customers by manually hosting and providing service. But would love to join the program and I am willing to meet all the terms and conditions. We have an excellent woocomm product that you can consider to make it part of this.

Sam

This seems is able to seize the international market hosting :joy:

@matthewcoxy What is there for affiliates from hosting packages? It must be somewhere competitive to other hosting providers that pays between $100-200+ for each referral or maintained the lifetime value with monthly payments.

Hi @cirvitis, great question.

Envato Hosted is in it’s very “under-construction” early stages, and is not currently part of the affiliate program. As we learn more about the product we will look at how best to incorporate it into the program.

At the end of the year we have some information going out with an update on Market, Hosted, Elements, and Studio that will provide more detail on how to be involved in helping shape the program.

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Thank you for the information! Very much look forward to this.

Is it worth having a static preview image for items on the hosted page, rather than drawing from the current preview on the item’s marketplace page? I notice one has a banner saying “Christmas Sale 35% Off” which could cause confusion and potential dissatisfaction when people are signing up. So rather than it being $19 a month, they might think it’s $12.35 instead.

I believe they are fixing this for this exact reason.

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A real-world example helps a bit on the decision-making process :slight_smile:

Anybody willing to share their hosted website link in Envato hosting?

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Such dishonest company and poor support. “Free Trial” for Envato Hosted is not “free trial”. No charge to credit card if cancel at least 1 day in advance? Great! Let me cancel 8 days in advance! Nope, still charge me for the full month. And when they refund, they fail to refund the cost of the FX transaction. If they cancelled like they were supposed to, no refunds would have been needed! Their customer support team says its my fault.
Sham!