What you need to know:
- All legacy “lifetime” THESIS licenses will expire at midnight on September 30, 2023.
- Sites with expired licenses will no longer receive automatic THESIS updates. You will not be able to download THESIS, either, but your sites will continue to work normally.
- If you wish to keep using THESIS, you will need to purchase a FOCUS license in order to get a valid THESIS license key (FOCUS includes license keys for both FOCUS and THESIS).
- You do not need to switch to FOCUS! You just need a valid THESIS license key to keep your sites updated and compatible with WordPress.
On January 26, 2019, I stopped selling THESIS and started selling FOCUS. Since that time, 7762 sites have activated THESIS license keys, but unfortunately, only 12.9% of those sites have paid a dollar to DIYthemes in the past 5 years.
That’s… not great. And it gets worse: Despite launching FOCUS in 2019, 81% of the software updates I’ve issued have been for THESIS (not FOCUS). In other words, I put a majority of my effort into the software that most people aren’t even paying for 😣
There’s more—an audit of support requests going back to 2019 reveals the customers most likely to ask for significant technical help do not have an active FOCUS license.
Considering these things, we see that legacy THESIS customers:
- Are the least profitable segment of the DIYthemes customer base
- Benefit from a majority of development/compatibility efforts
- Require the most technical, complicated support
This path is unsustainable for DIYthemes and therefore must change.
Moving forward, if you want to run THESIS/FOCUS on your sites, you will be expected to pay an annual license fee.
Again, you do NOT need to switch your sites over to FOCUS!
I will never require you to run FOCUS on your site(s); if you have a favorite THESIS Skin, I want you to continue to use it for as long as it suits your needs.
All I ask is that you retain a valid license key on each site where you run THESIS 👍