Two days ago, I went into the downloads section of my account to find that one of the plugins I had just bought under a month ago had been removed and was no longer available.

They list these reasons why a plugin may not be available anymore:

The author may have decided to permanently delete the item from Envato Market.

The items on Envato Market are not created by Envato. They are created by designers, developers and creatives from all over the globe.

Oh okay. So basically what you’re essentially saying is that you have no control over the continued support of your products, because they aren’t your products. They are the work of independent developers.

If you actually look over their policy, after a short time after the initial purchase, even tho Support is “Included in your purchase”, the support is through the developer. So If the developer decides just to ditch production of the plugin that you’re using, so you think they’re continuing support? So how can Envato Guarentee support of a plugin? They can’t.

Futher Down you’ll read as follows:

Once a file is permanently removed or deleted from our system, the item can no longer be offered for download. For these reasons, we can't guarantee the ongoing availability of items after your initial download.

So translation: Other then your first purchase, Envato can’t guarentee you shit. So if you buy a plugin that works now on your wordpress, and then when Wordpress updates weeks or months later and it somehow breaks, or conflicts with another plugin and you need support or a fix, and that plugin has been removed from Envato then that’s tough shit, because Envato doesn’t have to do anything about it.

If you click on why is my download no longer available they’ll give you some possible reasons. Are u serious? How about Envato provide the actual damn reason instead of you as the customer having to read some bullshit “it might have been because” reasons, like seriously?

Scope of “Support”

Envato Market is a mess. They can’t guarantee your purchase and any purchase you are making is not guaranteed, not controlled, and ongoing support can not be guaranteed either.

Honestly how much do you think Envato is paying these freelance developers to provide ongoing support anyways. Like there’s only so much a developer can do, and how much support they can process for plugins and randoms just asking questions about whatever.

The actual scope of support is unspecified either. Whether that be a general request, someone who doesn’t understand Wordpress or conflicting plugins and needs someone to actually SFTP into their Wordpress install, like, those are two way different kinds of support.

Wrapping it up