Sridhar Katakam

Genesis and WordPress Tutorials

Added Membership

by 53 Comments

I have moved almost all the tutorials I have been writing in this site for the last 2 years behind a paywall.

Details here: http://sridharkatakam.com/membership/

  • I really love your website and appreciate all the work you’ve put in you tutorials. But nearly 50$ a month is quite expensive for some people.
    Sad to see another great source of informations gone behind a paywall huge a the chineswall for me.
    But of course i can understand that quality has its price and lowlife hobos like me are just out of luck.
    Sometimes i think i should give up coding. I can’t even afford a macbook (which is the only tool accepted by the internet)

    Reply

  • Hi, I’ve a suggestion. How about adding a section in which you’ll mention all the premium content that you provide.

    Reply

  • It was great while it lasted. You are so good at what you do and I have always looked forward to all of your tips and development tools. Thank you for keeping it free as long as you did. I will miss this. Best wishes to you!
    Barbara

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  • At this price, even though the work you do is often over my head, I can justify it. At this price, I recommend you make ALL your tutorials public. It brings credit to you and earns you the gratitude of many.

    I’d be satisfied if the membership gives your suggestions for future tutorials a bit more weight and the right to request trouble -shooting within the scope of the tutorial.

    Reply

  • Sridhar, your advice, tips and tutorials are immense time savers and have helped me and a lot of Genesis users tremendously.

    I´m sorry to see all the free advice go but I understand and support your move to a paid membership.

    Thank you!
    Christoph

    Reply

  • Hi!

    I think $10 a month is too much. Your tutorials are great! But, for the same price, I can get a Netflix subscription, 1TB of storage in the cloud, and other things. I’d be more inclined to pay a yearly subscription of $20 or something. I think you’d get far more sales that way.

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  • Personally, I’m thrilled to see you getting this in place. I think $10 a month is too low – people may not realize how much work goes into the tutorials alone, not even counting the time it takes to figure out how to do these things in the first place. You deserve to be compensated for all the time you put into this community and I hope the response has been great!

    I will say, I hope eventually the more basic tutorials will be available to the public again, with the more advanced stuff reserved for members (kind of like what Pippin does). I point to your tutorials constantly for basic concepts and I think there is a lot of value in the “easy” steps (while people are still willing to pay to access the cooler/fancier stuff). Just my unsolicited two cents – I’m so interested to see how this goes!

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  • I think you should include the first two-three sentences of each post in the archives, so that people can see exactly what you’re offering. Without that, I don’t think any newcomers will understand the utility of your tutorials.

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  • Great to see you getting this set up — though I think I signed up twice (it’s been one of those mornings).

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    • @Brent

      I am not sure why, but both your PayPal transactions did not go through (neither was amount deducted from yours nor credited to mine).

      Thanks for reaching out to me in Slack chat and working this out. I see that you have signed up successfully using Stripe.

      Reply

  • I was glad to see the $10/month option for access to written tutorials. The only problem is that I signed up, paid via PayPal, I’m still logged in but I’m getting a restriction notice when I try to read any of the content. Can you help?

    Thanks,
    Susan
    rubyshoesmedia.com

    Reply

    • @Susan

      Not sure why, but your PayPal transaction(s) did not go through. I did not receive the amount(s). Can you please check your PayPal account and tell me if you see any debit?

      If you have not been charged, please try signing up using Stripe option instead of PayPal.

      If you would like to reply privately via the contact form, it is here: http://sridharkatakam.com/contact/

      Reply

  • Tried one more time. I’ve signed up twice (and afraid I paid twice) and each time I get a “thank you for signing up” confirmation and then no access. When I look under my account, it says I have no subscriptions and no payments. Yikes. Look forward to your help. Love your tutorials and appreciate your hard work.

    Susan

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  • Just signed up. I have combed through your tutorials for hours and hours, and I’m happy to pay a little bit to make sure you keep writing them 😉

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  • I LOVE your site and $10 a month will be paid for over and over by the time you save me. But I can’t get in. I just signed up and I’m logged in at the moment. I still get the “you must log in” message, even though I’m already logged in.

    Reply

    • Hi Marisa,

      Your payment status is appearing as Pending and as such you do not have access to the restricted content. I just checked my PayPal account and do not the payment come in from you. Can you kindly check yours and tell me if you see a debit?

      The same is happening with many others that are trying to pay via PayPal and I do not (yet) know why or importantly, how to fix this. Perhaps it takes a day for the status to automatically change to approved?

      Reply

  • Way to go. Thrilled to see you take this step 🙂 like Andrea though, I think you’re providing great value and $10 /mo is too low…

    Don’t let others dictate your pricing or business model. Do what’s best for you, your family, and your business… And your tribe will sign up.

    Reply

  • 10$ seems like a real bargain. I think that I will sign up as soon as the PayPal issues is fixed.

    If I may make one suggestion though: I think you should have an image above each teaser so everyone thinking of subscribing can actually see what they will be able to create with your code. I have used this site when it was free and seeing actual images of the end result is one on the things that kept me coming back and is one the reasons I am going to subscribe.

    Thanks

    Reply

  • Wow man!
    You’ve provide me with great content.
    I am happy to contribute to your work.

    Don’t mind the paywall at all.

    Thanks

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  • Hi there ,

    Must say I have enjoyed your tutorials recently as I have just started to get into WordPress and Genesis development

    $10 a month is a great price and I will be signing up for sure !!

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  • I have got a backup of your website that was created using httrack. So no need to become a member unless you have lots of new posts.

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  • Hello Sridhar,

    Thanks for providing your tutorials to the genesis community, for me they have been such a valuable resource to learn and customize genesis and dynamik. Without your tutorials I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I thank you kindly sir!

    I primarily use PayPal, and definitely want to support you and sign up for the yearly membership. However I saw in your comments that PayPal would not be fixed until later this month. I just want to ask if the pricing will remain the same at $120/yr if I wait to sign up via PayPal?

    Thanks again,
    Doug

    Reply

    • Hi Doug,

      Thanks for the support.

      The price will remain the same until at least 1 month after I officially ‘launch’ (fancy way of saying until I write a detailed blog post about it). After that, it will most likely go up. Members that sign up at a given price will be locked at that price as long as they do not cancel their membership.

      Reply

      • Thanks for the reply Sridhar! I will be signing up via PayPal on 2-26-15, and will pay for the year. Thanks again for providing your tutorials, I would be lost without them.

        Reply

        • Hello Sridhar!

          Today is the 26th, and I signed up for the membership via PayPal as per your instructions, however, I do not have access to the membership. Likewise it does not appear that the transaction went through PayPal, I do not see the deduction of payment.

          Thanks
          Doug

          Reply

  • Hi Sridhar,
    Can’t say that I’m surprised that you have gone the paywall route. It’s a good business model given the value of the content you provide. Your site is always the first place I go to when trying to figure out a customization to a Genesis site I’m working on. I have lost track of the number of “Source: SK” references I have placed in style.css and functions.php files that I have customized in the past year or so. I think the new lower price is quite reasonable.

    Continued success to you. I’m sticking with you.

    All the best,
    Matt

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  • Hi Sridhar,

    I have 2 questions:

    Can you give me an idea of how many posts you have regarding the Beautiful Pro theme, I thought in the past I came to your site to find the coding that I needed and now I can’t find it. I’m assuming it’s behind the “wall” which is fine but I wanted to be sure before I paid.

    Also,

    I’ve been trying to sign up but I’m having issues with my cc not processing, I’ve tried 2 that should work. I’m out of the country and have this issue with certain payment platforms. Paypal always works but I see you’re having a paypal issue. I’m really hoping to gain access today/tomorrow as I have to finish a project this week and could use the help of your site 🙂

    You’ve done such a great job providing this kind of support it’s clear that many of us just can’t live without it 😉 Congrats and Thanks!!

    Donna

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  • Are you going to consider one time payment options for some of your theme posts? The only reason I found your site a few weeks ago was because of your free One Pager theme. Which I can no longer access. I’m looking through the content that I can see to figure out if I want to go ahead and subscribe for $10 a month…but if all I need is the one theme…I think a constant monthly fee for that is a bit much.

    One time fees for your themes would be a good addition I think :).

    Reply

  • As someone who has found great pleasure in your tutorials I am both sad and happy for you. Sad since I´ve lost a great source for tutorials and tips & tricks for genesis and since I´m pretty much only living right now with no extra money even that fee of 10US is to much.

    Happy that you have grown so much you can add yet another portal for people to buy stuff from you.

    Reply

  • Sent form on your contact page with no reply, so posting here. Will get membership once PayPal is resolved, but I need to know if the tutorial for Parallax Pro video background will work for the new Altitude theme.
    Looking forward to all of the genesis tutorials, seems like they will be a big help considering I love that framework already! But I would love to tweak the parallax themes! Thanks for a fast response…maybe? 🙂

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  • Thanks for free tutorials during the last two years. Without them, I cannot develop my website as it is today.
    So sad to see all of my favorite posts are now behind paywall but I support your move. All the best to you SK.

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  • $10/month is a fair price and I will definitely subscribe, when PayPal is up again. But why don’t you make it a bit cheaper if I subscribe for a year e.g. $100 instead of $120? You give that discount for the support part!

    Reply

    • $10 a month for Tutorials Access is the introductory price and am going to raise it probably to $47/month going forward. I shall then provide a month off discount for the yearly option.

      Reply

  • If going for a paid membership model is what you need to do in order to continue doing your tutorials then that’s your decision and I have no problem with that. However, to place all the previously free content behind the paywall is, IMHO, not a good idea.

    I’ve recently restarted with Studiopress and, going through the forum for answers to my questions, I find a number of links to your tutorials which, at the time of the post, were free. I got fed-up of clicking on links only to be taken to your paywall. Very annoying & very frustrating. It doesn’t make me feel positive towards you and I’d guess many others might feel the same. To appear to go from very helpful to “You can only get my help now if you pay me” is not really a good impression.

    I’m currently starting a site based on Altitude Pro. A quick search on your site for that as a tag showed only 7 results. Why on earth would I pay even $10 per month for access to just 7 specific items relating to my theme? OK, so you probably have more which are generic but as you’ve put most of the stuff behind your paywall, we can’t see what they’re like or even if they’re relevant. And as for asking $47 per month – wow, you must be creating a lot of very high quality multimedia training & tutorials along with personalised help for that price.

    Its your choice but in my opinion, if you kept all the previously free content as free, but made future high-quality content as premium, there’s a much higher possibility that people would go on to join your membership; maybe even at the $47 price.

    As it stands, I believe you are likely to get a few people joining (most likely only those who had access to your free stuff in the past); some may then stay on as ‘loyal followers’; but most likely you will be faced with a lot of churn down the line so you’ll be spending less time on tutorials and more time on marketing.

    I wish you all the best for the future but I’ll not be joining your membership.

    Steve

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