I wrote it 3 years ago. Now it's confirmed. Envato is not innovating and now SAAS are winning.

Envato Authors CodeCanyon
1

Like for banks and fintechs, Envato is not innovating an is losing ground, money and customers in favor of SAAS solutions.

Envato is not bringing any innovation by 3-4 years. There are clearly many areas that need improvements to stay competitive.

  1. SAAS. There is no way to sell a plugin at monthly or yearly subscription plans.

  2. Add-ons, there is no way to sell add-on for another plugin in a SAAS way. For example, with my plugin [link removed by mod according to TOS] I’m selling add-ons outside of Envato because it’s the only way to provide a simple installation and a good user experience. The user clicks “Purchase” from within the plugin, get the License Key, the addon is active and it’s done!
    With Envato, a user needs to go to Envato, purchase it externally, manually install the plugin as an external and independent plugin, find the purchase code, go to the new plugin, and insert the key.

  3. Re-selling as SAAS. Many of the top-selling plugins offer the option to purchase the Extended License and re-sell the plugin as a SAAS. The problem is that the Extended license doesn’t provide a tool to manage it. We need a way to monitor the subscriptions, limit the number of clients an Extended License allows (I don’t want to sell the rights to re-sell my plugin for $199 and then see a year later that someone earns millions of dollars from it), and legal protection.

  4. Dedicated discounts for single customers and bulk purchases.

  5. Support area. The support area (actually just a comments area) is clearly bad and creates more problems than benefits: sensitive data, no faq area, no automated answers, no detailed customers information, no chat, no easy support renews option, and much more.

  6. No way to track affiliates sales.

Authors like me are starting to sell outside of Envato for these reasons, including the Top authors:

  • Themepunch (Revolution Slider) [link removed by mod according to TOS]
  • Elfsight (Instagram Feed)[link removed by mod according to TOS]

Envato provides a lot of great traffic and the problem is not the percentage of earnings they take but the above issues. I would be happy to come back if the features above are implemented.

This post is for Envato in the hope they will read it. Cheers.

1 Like
2

Hi!

Yes, wrote posts on the same topics in the last couple of years, not a single interest, from the sellers or Envato.

They’re so high on the profit they’re making that decided not to care just about anything.

We’re also packing up our bags and are getting ready to leave this place.

We’re thinking into starting a solid competitive market.

Regards.

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3

Thanks for sharing your opinion. The more we are, the stronger we are.

5

How are they able to sell outside Envato when they are exclusive authors?

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Exclusive Authors can sell addons outside of envato. But I don’t know how Themepunch can sell Revolution Slider and Essential Grid. I sent a ticket to the envato support

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8

Thank you for your concerns @Schiocco !

We have opted out of the exclusivity before we started to sell outside Envato. We do not know why it takes so long for Envato to process.

If you need more information on how we run our business you can also contact us directly.

Cheers, Dirk @ ThemePunch

9

Everything is clear now! Thanks for the information and I hope you will grow even more now!

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@Schiocco Envato is now B Corp, Envato bought Placeit, Envato doing many other things.

Seems like they do not focus on TF or CC. How many more years do we need to wait for a proper Description area while uploading. Its still a text area. Markdowns and other options are there, But still we have to wait until the item to get LIVE to see if we made any mistakes or not.

11

I think you right to say they have many other things but not that they do not focus on TF or CC.
It is the inverse, a good business always has the main focus to which generates more revenues: TF e CC.