ThemeHouse Product & Subscription Update

TL;DR

• We’ve supported the XenForo community for over ten years
• We are ready to start taking on more ambitious goals
• To do that, we are investing less in ThemeHouse and the XenForo theme and add-on market
• We’re still doing what we love: building and supporting beautiful, engaging communities
• There are big changes to products and subscriptions on ThemeHouse
• Focusing on our 3 core services: Community App for XenForo, Streaming platform, and our premium add-on subscription AC Resources
• Thanks for all your support - past, present, and future.

Why change?

Audentio has continued to grow in many ways, allowing us to start putting the pieces together to achieve some of our more ambitious goals. We’re a small company, so it’s exciting to start taking bigger steps toward our vision and we are confident in the knowledge we have and in our team.

Our future plans include:

• Developing a community strategy for Twitch, Discord, and other social platforms
• Developing new integrations, bots, and tools for such platforms
• Finally building out a new platform we've envisioned since we got into community building

So we can take these steps, we are going to stop investing as much as we have been in the ThemeHouse brand that is responsible for developing and designing themes and add-ons for the XenForo marketplace primarily. It isn’t feasible for us to take our next steps if we remain so heavily invested in a single platform. We have no control over how the platform is built, when it is updated, how it is maintained, which of our features will be replaced by the core platform in an update, how successful the platform is or it’s trajectory. It is more apparent than ever that staying in the position we are is not a smart decision for us.

What changes are happening?

Some of the changes effective on ThemeHouse include:

Update: We've officially released our free software products that can be downloaded from our public Github here. Please note, these products are unmaintained and unsupported. Before modifying any of the products, please read through our terms fully and carefully to ensure proper protocols are being followed.

Premium add-ons:

• We will be making A LOT of our ThemeHouse products open source or free
• We will be moving the open-source products to a repository that anyone can access (Coming soon!). Open source products are unmaintained and unsupported but if any add-on developers are interested in maintaining/supporting them, they are most welcome to.
• Free products can be found on ThemeHouse and will be supported and maintained.
• Almost all of our private add-ons and tools as well as some themes will be only available to those working with us on an active project or available and supported with an active Resources subscription.
• Other than through our Resources plan, the rest of our add-ons will be either free and supported or open-source and not supported. There will no longer be any way to buy one-time annual licenses for XenForo add-ons and will otherwise not be available to be renewed either.
• Product licenses have been extended by 3 months for support and updates to help with the change.

In a nutshell, if we charged for the add-on before it's either in our AC Resources plan or we made free.

Here is our current plan for XenForo 2 add-ons:

Subscriptions:

• We are replacing all previous subscriptions with one subscription or a one-on-one relationship.
• All our premium add-ons will live in AC Resources
• Clients with an active XF2 Essential suite will continue to have access and support until the subscription expires for products that are included in the suite and are not open sourced.
• The XF1 and XF2 Essential suites are no longer purchasable.
• Any active XenForo Theme & Add-on Plan, MyBB Upsurge, XenForo Add-on Plan, MyBB Theme Plan, XF2 Essential Suite, or WordPress Upsurge subscriptions will remain active until they expire and will then not be renewable.

The main rationale here for why we no longer will be offering cheaper subscriptions:

• Many customers would buy our subscriptions plans and cancel immediately either through a paypal refund request or manually
• They would then complain on the public thread if we did not or demand support if we did not comply
• Our add-ons require a lot of support to work on many different servers, many different versions of XenForo, many different bridges, many different themes, etc. and support has become a large investment of time

Support and updates

Support and updates have never been guaranteed. While we’ve sold lifetime access once before, we never guaranteed we would support any add-on forever. Every product has a life cycle to where it no longer makes sense. Supporting and providing updates to add-ons has been an ever increasingly more difficult process the last few years. And not just for us but for many of the developers in the XenForo community, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

So for this reason, we’ve made just ONE plan for support and updates, and that is our AC Resources subscription. It is far more expensive than our typical licenses, but it covers everything we do. We may lower the price at some point but right now this is what we wish to introduce it as. And we no longer support automatically purchasing due to abuse.

If you don’t have support for a product and need help, please contact us here. We are considering refunds depending on when you purchased the product. Support may be billable but we’ll be happy to take a look and provide a quote.

Where is our energy being focused moving forward?

It is time to look towards the future!

Our primary focus is on community strategy, management, general development, and building the tools we see communities needing as it's always been. ThemeHouse will still be around but with changes so we’ll be able to better support our clients and future plans.

• Support our valued clients over the years in anything they need.
• Continue to enhance and support our Community App and Streaming platform.
• Fully supporting and investing in our premium XenForo add-ons which are now neatly bundled in the AC Resources plan

As mentioned above, we have a new platform we’ve been working on. While we will share more coming soon, the main rationale has been that supporting third-party, distributed code, on different servers, different versions of software, etc. is just not smart anymore. And probably hasn’t been smart for a long time. Taking ALL the work we do and supporting it in one product just makes sense, and that's what we will be doing.

We couldn’t be more excited for what is to come and hope you are too.