We've been asked quite a few times now by potential translators if they could get free addons in exchange for their translation work.

First of all, if you're one of these users, let me thank you for offering your help. We appreciate very much translations made by all our users around the globe.

However, after long talks, we have decided not to give away free addons in exchange for translations. There are two main reasons for that.

Fairness to All Translators

We are thrilled and amazed to see how many translators gave some of their time to translate Awesome Support.

At the moment, the plugin is being translated into multiple languages - the poeditor.com project shows 20+ languages in the process of being translated.

To all of you translators, a big thank you.

Now, as you may know, translations are managed on Transifex (https://www.transifex.com/themeavenue/awesome-support/). [edit 2017: translations are now managed on poeditor.com]. This means that anyone can request a new translation or contribute to an existing translation anytime. And it happens often.

Awesome Support Transifex Project

In the morning, when checking Awesome Support things, I realize that we have an extra translation request. Most of the time, those translators don't contact us prior to creating a new translation.

Now, the problem we have is that those translators aren't even contacting us regarding translation. And that's ok. But then we believe it would be unfair for those translators, working without reward, if others were getting free stuff.

We Work For Free Too

The second reason why we decided not to give away free addons is because we too, work for free. And it takes a lot more time than translating.

Awesome Support is completely free. Of course we have addons for sale, but a large part of our users just use the core without purchasing anything. And that's ok, because that's how we made it. However, building the core, with all its features, takes time. A lot of time.

Support also takes time. We have priority support for buyers, but we try to answer every question asked on WordPress.org support forum. This also takes a huge amount of time.

Including development and support, even though I don't have an exact number to give, we spent thousands of hours of work.

We believe that, as we provide that much work for free, contributions, like translations, can be free too.

On a side note, we now have 12 [edit: more than that now in 2017] contributors on the GitHub repository. These contributors, who wrote code for the plugin, never got (and never even asked for) free addons. Many thanks to those contributors too! You can check out the team page here: https://getawesomesupport.com/team/

One More Benefit

Product updates will overwrite translation files with the ones we have in our translation repositories.  If we have an incomplete translation then that will overwrite your more complete translation file - meaning that you will have to manually replace the translation file after every update.  Thus, if you have gone through the effort of translating one of our products you can make sure that the next minor update of the product does not overwrite your work simply by submitting your translations to our repository.

THANK YOU

Last thing I need to do now is thank you all for your contributions. Be it bugfixes, code improvement, translation, promotion... You're a huge help to us and we're glad to have you by our side.