Theme Updater & Backups | OOTS

DON"T USE. BROKE MY SHOPIFY STORE. OUR SLIDESHOW, PRODUCT PAGES. SITE SPEED, PAGE LOADING, CHECKOUT.

If you are looking for somewhere to throw away money, this is it! This app did absolutely NOTHING to preserve my settings or customizations. I bought it because upgrading normally wasn't keeping even some basic settings. Figured this would help. Nope. This was a simple upgraded. Already on shopify 2.0, so not an issue with that.

EDIT: Regarding their reply... My theme settings were able to be transferred over to my new theme because I did it all manually myself. Please don't try and infer that this app had anything to do with that. Come on now.

Beware of this company! Do not waste your money. Their current customer service is awful, often referring you to have to "hire an Expert" to get your theme even working to a basic point. I purchased mine years back and back then they excelled at helping me to customize it. Not recently. My current theme started to give a bunch of Google Search Console errors and they told me that the only solution was to upgrade to the latest version to get those solved. Ok. After reading these reviews and their notes about this updater app I decided instead to save the money and update it manually. But, even updating the theme manually, their new updated theme is half baked and it needs a lot of coding to get it right to where my previous theme even was. After lots of back and forth (prepare to wait 24-48 hrs for them to get back to you for each response) they would not help even to fix simple issues often referring me to "hire an Expert".

Worst customer service. I bought their theme 4 years ago for $425. At first you could upgrade for FREE. Now you have to pay $9 to upgrade. Knowing that from July 28, 2022 to November 2022 there were no less than 6 updates of the theme because each time the new updates had bugs.

This is a total disrespect towards the customer. It's already not the cheapest theme on the market, but to have to charge again its own customers to get updates? That's really taking people for cash machines.

RUN FROM THIS APP. DOES NOT WORK. RUBBISH. Guarantee we'll get a faster response to this Review than we will support. The App is not worth the time, money and energy. It does not work with PixelUnion. It creates more work. Who has the time to wait 1-2 days let alone 24 hours with "premium" support for a response. Find a better Theme than using PixelUnion and this App from Out of the Sandbox. More importantly-find companies with better support.

Day 2 STILL WAITING FOR SUPPORT.
A MONTH LATER AND IT STILL SUCKS. LOOK AT ALL THE POOR REVIEWS-DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY OR ANY OF THEIR APPS. Shopify should dump them

Wow. I'm shocked ... I haven't even used this yet. No idea we were being billed. Surprise, surprise! Why not just do a once a year update and charge a flat fee of $150. That's actually reasonable instead of continually updating ... what a mess.

I subscribed to the ProPlan of this app on Wednesday 4/1/2020 and, on the same day, I contacted ProPlan support asking a couple of questions via the correct link inside the app interface. Today is Saturday 4/4/2020 and no reply has been received, even though they promise priority support for ProPlan Subscribers. 72 hours is by no means priority support.
Additionally, after I subscribed to the ProPlan, the section on How to Update still says the following:

"If any error messages are received when updating your theme to the latest version, all customizations to the mentioned files will need to be carried forward manually. If you need assistance with carrying over your previous customizations, we'd recommend reaching out to some of our recommended experts."

Here it is paramount to mention that the ONE AND ONLY point of this ProPlan subscription is to GUARANTEE a fully automatic, hassle-free theme update. The second I have to manually carry forward my customizations, I should be refunded for my subscription. I also asked about this on my support request three days ago, but I have received no response.
Please contact me ASAP with full response to my support request, including a clarification about what happens when the app does not work. Do I get refunded for a non-working app?

A good idea when it came out, though it was only partially helpful for complex customizations that had been added to the default themes.

Unfortunately, now that even the basic version is to be a monthly subscription, we'll be deleting and finding other options.

Very poor service and underhand fees - simply read the reviews. The app doesn't work very well, and now a greedy developer wants to charge over $100 a year (forever) for an app to update a couple of lines of code. Their themes are full of bugs, support is very slow (at times even leaving bugs in the code - I'm looking at you 'Artisan'), and now they are trying to sneakily charge for something that was advertised as part of their theme purchase. I doubt this is acceptable practice, or legal, in most countries.

We have already had to change two Out of the Sandbox themes due to bugs in their software, and now they do this. If I were them, I would be very embarrassed as to how they treat long standing customers.

The most insulting thing is the email we were sent, spinning this charge as an 'opportunity'. Please don't patronize us with PR, you are simply milking merchants for all you can get before moving on.

P.S. Following the developers response: You seem to miss the point - everyone who purchases an Out of the Sandbox theme agreed to do so with the knowledge that the updating app comes along with it (and we have also paid an initial premium for the theme and updater app). You are significantly changing the agreement by now charging for the app, and I would say that is unlikely to be legal here in the EU. Also, you mentioned in one response that you need the money to fund your IT systems - well, if you can't afford to provide a service, don't offer it for free with the intention of locking customers into a 'blackmail scheme'. Have the dignity to admit you simply want more money by charging customers twice.

A premium theme should not require an additional $9 per month to upgrade the few times per year that is necessary. This will not build good will for Out of the Sandbox or Pixel Union. I imagine this will also impact reviews of their themes directly. I like Empire but would not recommend it to others given this recent sheisty maneuver.