Disappointing follow-through on a $650 custom integration
I normally leave positive reviews, and I had hoped to do the same here. Unfortunately, my experience with WP Swings’ custom development service was frustrating and involved considerably more follow-up than I expected. WP Swings offers a great plugin. I initially suggested improvements I thought could benefit other publishers, including dynamic author information, clearer footer labels, and the ability to sell current, ad-free article PDFs through WooCommerce. Their team explained that these would require paid custom development rather than additions to the main plugin. During the initial discussions, I arranged a call after midnight my time to accommodate their stated business hours in India. I had already emailed the requirements and sent an agenda beforehand. However, the representative seemed unfamiliar with the project, and I spent much of the call, half awake, explaining those requirements again. I left feeling that the representative had not been adequately briefed and that the call had done little to move things forward. On May 29, I accepted a $650 quote covering PDF formatting, author information, WooCommerce purchasing, bundles and upsells, and automated product creation from my articles. Their estimated completion time was six to seven working days from kickoff. I did not reach final sign-off until July 5. The team implemented useful features and made corrections, which I appreciate. However, getting there required weeks of repeated follow-ups and several rounds of partial fixes. Examples included missing typography changes, incorrect author-box placement, author links that did not work, and the wrong image appearing in the PDF header. I repeatedly found outstanding details in work presented as completed. There were also disagreements about the agreed scope. In June, their team said dynamic bundles had not been discussed. I had to refer them back to their May 29 confirmation covering bundles and cart upsell prompts before that work progressed. Repeatedly having to re-establish what had already been agreed added to the frustration. On July 5, at hand-off, all outstanding issues appeared resolved, including the email download link. Unfortunately, that was not the end of the problems. By September, I discovered that a customer’s purchased PDF was missing paid customizations, including the “Author:” label, clickable author attribution, and the final author bio box. These features had been included in the original scope and explicitly confirmed as implemented in June. On September 15, WP Swings confirmed that a plugin update had overwritten the custom work. They advised me to avoid automatic updates, retain an older customized backup, or commission a paid add-on. In October, they also increased my installed plugin’s version number from 1.6.4 to 9.6.4 to suppress further updates. That raised concerns for me about missing future bug fixes, compatibility improvements, and security patches. Their later response acknowledged that avoiding updates was not a viable long-term strategy for maintenance and security. Their proposed permanent solution was a separate add-on costing another $500 to preserve the customizations through future updates. Their original proposal did not clearly explain before payment that normal updates to their own plugin could overwrite the commissioned work, leaving me to restore an older version, suppress updates, or pay for a different implementation. That distinction would have mattered to my purchasing decision. Separately, customer download issues have been recurring. I reported broken customer confirmation-email links to WP Swings in June and July, and three customers later reported access failures in September and October. Some links returned buyers to the homepage rather than delivering their purchased PDF, and I had to fulfill each purchase manually. In October, their explanation was that customers needed to be logged in, despite my store allowing guest checkout. Those delivery problems remained unresolved with WP Swings, so I ended our working relationship and took over the work independently. I am continuing to use the plugin, but I would not commission further custom development from WP Swings based on this experience. Clearer advice before payment, better preparation for calls, more thorough testing of the customer purchase process, and more consistent follow-through would have made a substantial difference.
By PWS