Bricks team's stance on Cwicky's sudden end of development

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Hey there,

First off, big shoutout to the Bricks team for all the awesome work they’re doing lately. Bricks is really hitting its stride!

Now, onto something that I’m sure it’s been on a lot of Bricks’ customers mind. I’m sure you’ve heard about the sudden stop to Cwicly’s development.

It caught a lot of us off guard, and now Cwicly’s customers are most likely scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s next.

Even though I haven’t personally used Cwicly, it got me thinking about keeping a closer eye on the tools I rely on. I’m pretty happy with Bricks overall, but this got me wondering: what is Bricks team stance about all this? If such statement was already made elsewhere, feel free to direct me to it, I could not find it anywhere.

Thanks for looking into this. Appreciate it.

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I bought Cwicly and Bricks, and fortunately I used Bricks. It calls into question the use of builders designed by small teams, I think. It’s the kind of situation that wouldn’t happen with Elementor, for example.

It must be horrible for people who have created large sites with Cwicly…

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It was a making of Cwicly’s own doing.
Louis repeatedly engaged with Kevin Geary, who is all-in on Bricks.
The scenes of letting in the Wooden Horse in the city of Troy comes to mind.

The best course of action for Cwicly would have been to ignore attacks by Kevin as Elementor does.
Kevin branded Cwicly as the second best builder, behind Bricks, that’s the worst kind of compliment to receive, haha - Who wants to be with the Second Best!

As a product too, it could not stand up to Bricks or Elementor, it was neither here nor there.

Over 90% of start ups fail.

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Honestly, it feels like there’s more to it than just “Oh, no, this guy won’t tell me my builder is the best, I have to close up shop now”

It seems like a weak excuse for something deeper. Just my opinion of course.

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What made me decide not to go with Cwicly was:

  • Focusing on Gutenberg
  • I didn’t like their pricing model…

Gutenberg:
For blogging, I like the flow of Gutenberg. But to base your website design off of it, I think we’ll see some big breaking changes coming… I think it’s too early to trust in such solution [Gutenberg] for LONG-TERM where you want to focus on your business/customers, and less development (if you’re just a single person doing it all).

Cwicly Pricing:
Previously using Elementor, the recurring yearly fee for a theme was not enjoyable, especially with how slow Elementor made my website (especially in the backend). Also, leaving Elementor was the worst experience, as when you stop paying (was transitioning to Bricks), there were so many pop-ups about “re-activate your license”, and you literally could not use the builder to create new pages (or modify pages with pro-blocks)…

When I saw Cwicly’s pricing model, it reminded me of Elementor’s… so in addition to it being Gutenberg based, the pricing made me look towards Bricks (while its LIFETIME offer was a steal).

Why I Chose Bricks:

Bricks main selling point for me was the builder is the theme (so I don’t have to fight CSS with the base theme & page builder), and its promised speed. My front/backend speed is now reasonable for the amount of plugins.

But I haven’t used Bricks for everything… I went with a lot of custom code. WordPress PHP functions are relatively easy to implement, and far less breaking changes compared to how fast page builders are going.

Additionally, Bricks allows us to write custom PHP within pages (without the need for a shortcode :sweat_smile:… most of the time!)

When do I use Bricks Builder?
If things are over my head in the code… such as advanced Javascript, or if it’s simple to implement/maintain long-term.

This has proven to be a nice solution… I use my page builder when desired (and it’s not heavy), but stick close to WordPress for long-term maintenance.

This news is surprising, but something I’ve gotten bitten by during my Elementor years…

Plugins are useful, but they can fight each other’s codebase (bugs), or in this extreme case… cease development…

Once you learn about hooks & filters, you can truly tweak things to your liking, with typically much less breaking changes!

Coming from the music production world, where plugins are very similar in the WordPress world, companies also close down… and if you’ve used those plugins on serious projects… you better hope you kept the plugin installer around…

Thank-you Bricks team for the page builder solution I’ve been looking for :slight_smile:

In the Future…
I also think we’re kind of in a “lull” space… as WordPress Block Themes are sure to make some huge breaking changes to the way we build WordPress websites… it’s still early… but something to always keep in mind before getting too “vendor-locked”… (which is often times avoidable to a point)

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It does makes you wonder…

Cwicly recently had an LTD campaign run on AppSumo (December i believe), and this month marked the end of the refund window on that platform. Cwicly went for the quick buck before closing shop?

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I was a Cwicly user meaning I’m now actively looking for an alternative.

I created several projects with Cwicly which means I face countless not billable hours of work to rebuild all of them until the end of this year. This is an economic hit for me I can’t quite fathom yet.

That’s why I would be very interested to hear from the team behind Bricks what they think of this situation.

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Any product may no longer be supported at any time. These are the realities. Nobody will give you eternal guarantees. I don’t think the Bricks team can promise more than they can live with . The fact that Cwicly development has stopped is not the end of the world. It is possible that the product is so good that it does not contain any vulnerabilities or critical errors. You just have to use it for the next 5 years. But for your next project, be sure to buy Bricks :slight_smile:

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I don’t think people are asking for eternal guarantees, it’s not about that at all. There are multiple choices in this market, so it’s natural to choose one that’s more attuned to what one intend to do. Like any relationship in life, the parts involved need to keep talking to each other in order to keep it going. A sense of reinforcement of trust from time to time only improves things. Businesses don’t live in a vacuum.

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To characterise the interactions Kevin Geary had with Louis from Cwicly as “attacks” is disingenuous or even misleading. Has debating the pros and cons now become attacking?

Kevin Geary constantly praised Cwicly and encouraged anyone wanting to work in Gutenburg, to use Cwicly.

No my friend… debating is not attacking. Let’s choose our words a little more carefully.

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Disingenuous! Misleading!
No. It’s Vulture Capitalism at its finest.

Kevin Geary is not a neutral party.
Kevin is #TeamBricks.
Kevin himself uses Bricks and promotes it as the best and #1 Wordpress pagebuilder.

Thus engaging with Kevin only has downsides for any pagebuilder developer.
Louis from Cwicly didn’t have this simple foresight and invited him to trash Cwicly on Cwicly’s own YouTube channel where Kevin pointed out that the Icon interface of Cwicly is poor UI/UX, Tailwind integration was a poor choice and so on and so forth.

Debates have consequences, one side wins and one side loses.
Cwicly lost the debate, and got annihilated from the face of Earth.

I have chosen my words carefully and my analogy of Kevin being the Wooden Horse let inside the city of Troy is apt.

Last I saw Kevin was enjoying the spoils of war, by distributing vouchers for ACSS to Cwicly customers.

It’s a form of Vulture capitalism.

I never had any interest in Cwicly, but as an observer of the debacle, I shared my perspective. Cheers!

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A debate now becomes “Vulture Capitalism”? Really?
Your entire reply illustrates my point. Why not interact with assertions instead. If one side was making false claims, prove them false and make your case that way.

You shared your perspective, indeed, and your perspective (like mine) proves that you too are not a neutral party (no one is for that matter).

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There is a difference between you and me debating, and Louis and Kevin debating.

Our debate is academic, as there is no money involved in our debate, but in the debate between Kevin and Louis, Money is the motivating factor of the debate.

If Louis wins the debate, he attracts Bricks customers, and Tailwind gains ground in the Wordpress ecosystem, and if Kevin wins the debate, Bricks and ACSS reign supreme.

Kevin handily beat Louis, who had to pack his bags and shut shop, and some/many of the Cwicly/Tailwind customers are now going to be ACSS customers, and Bricks is the indirect beneficiary of Kevin’s efforts.
Free vouchers from the Good Samaritan! Great Marketing!

I encourage you to look up Vulture capitalism, and a few of its case studies.
Cheers.

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“Our debate is academic, as there is no money involved in our debate, but in the debate between Kevin and Louis, Money is the motivating factor of the debate.” <— nonsense, a debate is won or lost on the merits of each sides argument.

You clearly don’t like Kevin Geary at all, that is your prerogative, but you are careful enough to disguise your dislike just enough, not to sound openly hostile.

“Free vouchers from the Good Samaritan! Great Marketing!” <— If Kevin Geary DID NOT offer recompense to people HE REFERRED TO QUICKLY, of which he felt guilty about because they were out of pocket, he would get slammed. If in this case HE DOES offer recompense, he gets slammed. He can’t win with haters, because haters will hate, and you my friend, are a hater. Again your prerogative to dislike whomever you wish.

Keep one more thing in mind, the people that HE REFERRED to Cwicly where already likely using ACSS, so they were ALREADY customers. He has now offered these people vouchers for whatever they spent with Cwicly. So for people that already have ACSS, they can get the LTD and move away from the subscription (this is LESS money for him, not more). Your logic is a tad off there.

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Hater! Haha

For your kind reference.

Make cogent arguments, and I’ll address the core of the argument.
Start name calling, and it becomes pointless to debate.

Cheers!

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“Start name calling, and it becomes pointless to debate.” LOL, you realise that is exactly what you were doing to Kevin Geary?

P.S. You can advocate for something good and be a hater of the person who created it. Your posts demonstrates this beautifully.

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Unlike you, I didn’t indulge in name-calling Kevin Geary.
I merely highlighted the money trail and the tricks of the trade.

Anyhow, G’day.

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See this as a positive question and not a dark and somber question.
I am always thinking of …What will happen if something happens to a developer eg. death, terminal sickness etc. Are their companies structured in such a way to ensure business continuity?
How is Bricks structured?
I have experience in this, locally, hence the question.

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This is a bizarre comment and demonstrates you either didn’t watch or didn’t understand what you watched. Kevin didn’t trash Cwicly, he said it was, in his opinion, 2nd best page builder in WP many times.

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I’m of a similar mind here. I don’t necessarily need Bricks’s stance on this but it would be nice to have some assurance on what Bricks’s health is as an org and what the company/Thomas’s goals are for the business

in my mind, I worry about acquisitions more than anything, not so much the business shuttering.

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