Joining Sandhills Development

Big news…I’m excited to announce that WP Simple Pay has joined Sandhills Development!

Sandhills is the team behind popular WordPress products such as Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, AffiliateWP and Sugar Calendar.

WP Simple Pay launched over four years ago to provide a simple way to accept one-time and recurring credit card payments on WordPress using Stripe. It was intended for site owners that didn’t need all the bells and whistles of a more full-featured shopping cart solution or membership site. As WP Simple Pay has grown, I believe it’s kept true to it’s simple yet powerful mantra.

If you’re a current or potential customer, you may have a few questions…

What will happen to WP Simple Pay?

WP Simple Pay will remain as its own independent WordPress plugin for the foreseeable future. The difference is that it’s going to reap the benefits of having experienced developers and product folks from the Sandhills team working on it with me. In turn, customers can expect more frequent feature releases going forward.

Over the years, the needs of some WP Simple Pay customers have outgrown the core feature set available. This was expected as their businesses began requiring more functionality such as digital delivery, generating license keys, additional payment gateways, or a membership area. In fact, we’ve been using Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP ourselves to sell WP Simple Pay due to the necessity of some of these features.

For these reasons, we plan on improving the ease of migration from WP Simple Pay to Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro or even SellBird, a hosted e-commerce solution currently under development. Note that AffiliateWP already integrates with WP Simple Pay.

What about the team?

At the time of this transition, the only full-time team member is me, the founder. 👋 For now, my role will be to continue heading up WP Simple Pay development and support. But I’ll also be focusing on product direction, marketing strategies and improving Stripe integrations across more of the Sandhills suite.

WP Simple Pay has been using the fantastic support folks from wpSaaS and content writers from AudienceOps, and we will continue to use them for the time being since they know WP Simple Pay so well.

Are you changing prices?

At the time of this merge, WP Simple Pay licenses and prices have not changed and we have no immediate plans to do so. For existing customers, whichever annual plan you’ve subscribed to will remain at its original price indefinitely. There is no need to purchase or upgrade anything new.

Why the merge now?

Over this summer I invited Pippin Williamson, the original founder of Sandhills Development, to have a conversation about long-term goals for our companies and products. Pippin and I have known each other for six years, and during that time have frequently referred, integrated with, and contributed to each others’ products.

In the end, Pippin and I agreed that combining our team and products would be a huge win for our customers and communities. I am 100% confident that the Sandhills team will move WP Simple Pay forward with the same commitment and passion as they do with their existing products.

This is a huge milestone for WP Simple Pay and I’m super excited to join the Sandhills Development family!