In reply to Ron.

Also, the dev is NOT giving this as a “free gift”.

So...you paid for it? How much did it cost you? That sucks, because we got it for free, and so did everyone else we know.

The site is plastered with ads and he begs for donations.

So what if he added some ads to his site to help support it? He's free to do as he likes. He definitely doesn't "beg for donations". Although I did see a guy on the corner last week that looked just like him..maybe you got the two confused?

Seriously though...if you don't like ads, then just use an ad-blocker.

I suspect with that many downloads and active users there is something reasonable coming in.

That's not likely. I've never heard of a plugin developer that was able to make any kind of reasonable living off donations, or even ad revenue. It might provide some extra coffee or beer money though! But hey, I'm always open to being proved wrong, so we can run a test. If you would like to develop a plugin as successful and popular as CF7, you can test that theory out and let us know how it works. Let us know when you get to 40 million downloads, and the beers will be on you. :)

And….we all know it doesn’t take 30 minutes to answer a freaking support request in the forum.

Well, you would be...what's the word...not correct...there. Clearly you've never done plugin support. We often spend more than 30 minutes (sometimes up to three hours) helping people with support requests. (And yes our plugins are free.)

30 minutes is nothing. You often will go back and forth with people, not just provide a one-off answer. Sometimes you have to go back and research an issue, or run tests. Keep in mind support doesn't only happen on the forums. A plugin author can have their support channel wherever it suits them best. We direct our plugin users to our site, and not the forums. Although, we do spend a good bit of time on the forums too. A response that is actually helpful will take more than 5 minutes to write.

Even so, just for argument's sake, we'll say you were right. We'll look at my example above using your math.

If a plugin author spends 30 minutes per support request, that’s 2,500 hours just doing support. There are only 2080 work hours in a year, so it would take 1.2 years to respond to all those requests.

If it only took 15 minutes per request,, that would cut the 1.2 years in half, and would still take the plugin developer 0.6 years (more than half a year, or approx 8 months.) to respond to all those requests.

But say we change it up a bit more. Say it only takes 5 minutes to answer a support request.

If it only took 5 minutes per request,, that would still take the plugin developer 0.2 years (aka 1/5 of a year, aka 10.4 weeks, aka 2 and a half months) to respond to everything.

Even using your math, it still would take 2.5 months!

Who do you know who works full-time for 2.5 months for no income? I sure don't know anyone. Even using your math, that simply doesn't work.

How about dropping all the negativity and giving the guy a break? It's a good plugin.