Damn son

I thought “Converter for Media” plugin was great.. it requires paying for AVIF and I never did because I just don’t see the cost making sense. Maybe if it was a lifetime license for a small fee I would pay. Of course I’m an old grouch who can’t justify all this new age subscription model bs. If I signed up for every plugin’s subscription model there is no way I could provide the savings I can pass on to my clientele. I would be bleeding so much money every month it would be absolutely bananas. The most recent off I ran into just the other day was $20 a month for access to copy/paste elementor components. 20 bucks a month. If he has 200 people paying him 20$ a month he is making more money than I do. Perpetually. And he has to update the codebase every now and again. God I’m in the wrong business.

So went to install the aforementioned plugin and saw this gem next to it which I had never seen before. Now I thought Matt over at Converter for Media did a nice clean job and didn’t nag to pay for the service. Well, the nagging started which whatever I gotta dismiss a notification here and there, I get it. A man’s gotta eat. But I’m NOT subscribing. I’ll pay a fee one time for all my sites I manage which is not many, I’m a jack of all kinda guy.

Anyway… CompressX blows converter for media out the water. It’s insanely clean. One page. Self explanatory. Doesn’t paywall open source software that is readily available on my VM. At least.. I don’t think the watermark is open source but I could be wrong. If it is, ok one strike. But when I got to the pricing tab of the site, it’s a lifetime license. Thank god. CompressX I don’t care two shits about watermarking but I’m really tempted to buy it because a man’s gotta eat. I’ve got one client I bet would pay for it. 50$ is quite steep for one domain but I can swallow it because I’m gonna use this on all my sites (the webp/avif compression).

Don’t ever change, devs. Please for the love of god don’t change. The whole world is full of greed, don’t sucumb. Writing some code that leverages open source software and charging a monthly fee for computers to do the work is insane to me. It’s totally against the ethos that started this whole tech revolution. But the general populace is drowning in tiktok brain rot so.. maybe I’m on the wrong side here. Maybe you should charge monthly… cause you seem like good people and I want good people to succeed and make money. Ah, a paradox.

Now I’ve gotta go install this plugin on all my sites and update my review on Converter for Media.