Hello everyone, apologies for the delayed reply. We sincerely appreciate all the feedback and highly value the support from our community who have been champions of this product for years. We understand the concerns and frustrations about this feature not being in the free version and recognize the need to be more transparent up-front in these kind of decisions.
At this time, we do not have plans to make changes to the license requirements for this feature. The decision to place this in a paid edition comes down to a few reasons:
- This was highly requested from top enterprise customers with distributed teams which helped us recognize how valuable this feature really is
- Our paid editions are designed to offer enhanced functionalities that cater to the needs of complex, larger organizations. Placing scheduled messages in the paid edition fits in with this thinking. By doing this, we’ve not removed anything from the free version, we’ve enhanced the value proposition of the paid versions.
We recognize the decision to make Scheduled Messages a paid feature is disappointing—especially to those of you who have been anticipating this feature for quite a long time. Our design preview posts in the forum are often early stage previews and the packaging decisions may not be known yet at the time we’re exploring designs (which was the case for this particular preview). However, we can do better in being more transparent up-front in our communications about the availability of features in our editions and we will make sure to include this kind of detail moving forward.
As it has been pointed out, the code for scheduled messages is in the public repo, so it is possible to get access to it if you wish to compile from the open source project. That’s always an option.
Thank you again for all the feedback. We do take it in to consideration and we do take it seriously.