I’ve stopped selling Active Contacts. Most of what it did is moving into Active Analytics, so if you liked it, you’re not losing much. If you never heard of it, that’s fine too, it didn’t get far.
This wasn’t an easy one. I liked building it, and I still think the idea was a good one. I just can’t look after it properly.
I ran out of hours
It’s only me here. I write the plugins, fix them when they break, answer the support emails and look after a bunch of client sites, usually in that order and usually late in the evening.
When I started Active Contacts I told myself it would be the last big plugin I’d build. After that, no more new stuff, only tidying up what I already have. Turned out that a CRM is a lot hungrier than I expected.
It sent emails, it talked to WhatsApp, it talked to a dozen AI providers, it pulled in Gravity Forms entries. Each of those changes something every few months, and each change meant another evening of me reading changelogs instead of fixing things people had asked for. Meanwhile, Lighthouse and ImagePress were waiting in the queue.
I’m also the person who keeps telling everyone to use small plugins that do one job. And there I was, shipping a 1000-in-1 plugin and calling it simple. I noticed. (Eventually.)
Why Active Analytics
Because they were always the same plugin, I just didn’t see it at the start.
Active Analytics tells you what’s happening on your website. Active Contacts told you what happened with one person, from the first page they read to the email you sent them a week later. Same question, smaller scale. Both keep everything in your own database, and nobody in the middle gets a copy of your visitors.
Putting them together means one plugin to install, one licence, one settings screen, and one plugin for me to keep in shape. I like those numbers better.
Here’s what’s moving across:
- follow-up emails, the ones that go out a few days after somebody gets in touch
- email templates, so you write them once
- the chat, with your own buttons and your own answers
- the WhatsApp button
- pipelines, the board where you drag an enquiry from “new” to “won”
- the visitor history, which pages somebody read before they contacted you
And what’s not:
- the AI assistant in the chat
- newsletters
The AI part was the one that broke the most and got used the least. The guided chat, the one where you write the buttons yourself, does the job for most small businesses anyway, and it never makes things up. Newsletters are a whole other world of deliverability and spam folders, and there are services out there that do nothing else.
Note: Active Analytics stays cookieless. Some of this needs a bit of rework to stay that way, so it’ll come in over a few releases, not all in one go. I’ll write about each one when it lands.
If you bought Active Contacts
Thank you, I mean it. Your copy keeps working, the same way all my plugins keep working after the licence runs out. Send me an email and we’ll work out the rest together, I’m not going to leave anyone stuck.
Seven plugins now, and more time for each of them. I think that’s the better deal for everyone, me included.
