Hi there,
Do theme authors control the licensing keys? or does envato? The reason I ask is because im in a tough situation… and dont know what to do. Long story short, I hired a theme’s author to customize the theme I bought… but hes MONTHS overdue on a 2 week project (its still not done), and a few weeks ago had the nerve to charge me $5300 ($80/hr) more than the $1500 he quoted because he ran into database and cache problems from his own poor choices (he installed the site and setup the dbase, but they corrupted. he recommended WPengine but had no idea how to use the cache). He already lost me a summers worth of sales and sponsorship opportunities (i made it so clear that summer was our launch date, but he’s months overdue, saying "sorry we had a national holiday, sorry im in montenegro)…
Anyway… if I pay him the additional $5300 that’s going to bankrupt my project, thats all ive saved up for marketing and promotion. Now he wont stop harassing me! Now hes threatening me that if I dont pay him he will retaliate. I guess that means hes going to pull my license?
For your question, what he could do is to block you from his system to prevent getting updates. Beside that, you have already paid for the license and he cannot cancel it anymore. It has to be through Envato ( refund ) to cancel the license code.
Sorry to hear that you had some bad experience but threatening is not a solution. Save all of the emails along with WA and other conversations, too, in case the situation escalates.
If you have paid via PayPal, just dispute the payment and provide the details.
In addition, most likely the project may not finish on time and if you’re in a situation with the urgency, feel free to contact me. I have some availability after the 20th and I would like to help you on this if you prefer to go with second option.
quick questions… so if i am shut out of getting theme updates, the coder could potentially hack my site through security vulnerabilities he is aware of within his own site (that i wont get updates for). How would I protect against that? a country IP block?
also, i was not aware that there is a legal solution when there is a conflict between two people and two different countries. is that true?? i never thought that was possible.
The code has to follow “standards” so there shouldn’t be any back-doors or vulnerabilities - there may be compatibility issues in the future though. - with this approach, no need to worry about it.
Depending on your payment/transfer, if it’s through PayPal, you can dispute. If it’s something else, contact the merchant support if there’s anything else to do but most likely, they won’t get involved ( except PayPal )
If you enlisted their help directly then thst is between the two of you.
Envato cannot get involved.
Same as anything else in life - if you hire someone to do something and they don’t or they threaten you etc then it’s grounds to take action weather that’s legal or otherwise. No one here is going to be able to offer detailed advice as we are not lawyers and do not have the full context etc
Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback. Im not a litigator, so I wouldnt get a lawyer involved. Was just wondering if thats even possible across country borders. All good though. I feel a lot better now.
