If you’ll be running a membership website in the Internet marketing niche, DAP would be a great choice for you with its built in affiliate management system and easy integration with 3rd party autoresponders. You have to get used to its interface and many options, but it is backed by solid support from the developer.
Ease of Installation and Usage
Digital Access Pass (DAP) is as easy to install as any other WordPress plugin. But if you feel like socializing, you can request from DAP’s developer to have it installed for you — free of charge! The crazy thing is he will install it for you even if it’s just for a trial! What’s more, they also provide a video tutorial to show you in step-by-step how you can install the script! So, it doesn’t get any better than that…
DAP employs the most practical protection model. In place of "membership levels", in DAP you have "Products". On your website, you can create several "products", i.e subscriptions. Your product will then have a sales-page and a collection of posts, post categories, files, and emails. This model gives you the option to offer several products on the same website.
Support
DAP’s developer, Ravi, promises his customers an undivided attention. He even gives out his personal mobile phone number on website. But if you prefer the traditional way and open an email support ticket, Ravi has a system in place for that as well.
Money Back Guarantee
You can try DAP for 30-days free of charge (Well, there is a $0.01 charge, which is negligible). If you don’t want to continue using the script, you have to contact DAP and inform them of your decision. Otherwise, it’s considered that you intend to use the script, and you’ll be automatically charged the full price of the license that you purchase.
Supported Payment Processors
DAP has native integration with PayPal, 1ShoppingCart, and ClickBank.
Download Protection
Using DAP, you can keep your premium files from being directly accessed by non-members. In other words, members will not be able to share protected download links in public forums and such.
Sequential Content Delivery
DAP fully supports sequential content delivery. You can make specific content available to your subscriber after a predetermined period of time. You can do the same with several pieces of content, be it posts or pages. With DAP, you can also provide sequential content delivery via autoresponders. You can basically setup an email course that goes out to your subscribers during variable intervals.
Partial Content Protection
DAP doesn’t provide any mechanism for partial content protection. You can protect an entire post or an entire category of WordPress posts, but you cannot protect a post partially.
Autoresponder, Email Marketing Integration
Most email marketing providers allow you to add subscribers by sending the subscription information to a designated email address. DAP takes advantage of this fact. You can specify your list’s email address and when you have a new subscriber to your website, DAP will send your subscribers information to your list’s email and your subscriber will be effectively added to your list.
Affiliate Program
DAP employs a unique affiliate program feature, unlike any other script we’ve tested. DAP has a built-in affiliates management system. Every subscriber to your website is automatically given an affiliate link, so that they can immediately start promoting your membership site. DAP gives you the option to pay your affiliate per lead and a percentage of the sale or a fixed commission.
Of course, if you would rather just use ClickBank, DAP has native integration with that.
Protected RSS Feeds
DAP doesn’t provide protected RSS feeds. Many people don’t consider this to be a serious limitation, though.
Available Membership Levels
In place of membership levels, DAP offers Products. You can offer several products on your website. Each product can contain a collection of posts, pages, emails and files. There is no limit on the number of products that you can provide. This effectively gives you the same functionality as the traditional membership levels model.
Available Licenses and Prices
1-Site License ($97)
This license gives you access to all the features that DAP has to offer. The one restriction is that you can install it on one blog or domain only.
3-Site License ($197)
With this you get a full featured DAP membership script that you can install on up to 3 websites. With this license, you also get two additional bonuses.
Unlimited License ($297)
With this license, you can install DAP on many website you own as you like. You can also install it once on a client website, if you’re a developer.
Membership Site-In-A-Box
- fully featured web hosting account
- WordPress installation
- Digital Access Pass installation
- Half hour consultation with DAP’s developer
It’s the quickest way to get started with your own membership website if you don’t already have a reliable hosting account with easy way to install WordPress.
See website for details on pricing
User Thoughts and Feedback
On 10-20-2008 user said:
I have been using it for a while as a beta tester and it was just released last week I think, but I love it so far.
On 06-15-2009 user said:
It protects everything and anything that’s hosted on my site perfectly and has been a breeze to install. It’s currently protecting hundreds of pages, streaming video and downloads (pdf, mp4, mov, mp3, etc) on one of my sites.
Hi there,
Can your plugin work side by side with Gigya Socialize?
see http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/
If yes then I would like to purchase.
Jon
Hi Jon,
Feel free to contact Ravi, the author of the script and ask him your question. His contact details are available on DAP website here.
Best,
-mk
The pricing on your site is quite outdated.
Pls see the new price at:
http://DigitalAccessPass.com/buynow.php
- Ravi Jayagopal
Thanks for the note, Ravi. I’ll update the pricing to your new ones…
MK,
You may want to link to a comparison of DAP vs the Competition, at…
http://DigitalAccessPass.com/showdown.php
Thanks!
- Ravi Jayagopal
Hey MK,
Great review of DAP. However, one other thing that you have wrong (or outdated) is DAP does allow for partial content protection. Using the WordPress MORE tag, and a setting in the DAP config/settings tab, you can have everything above the more tag visible. Anything after requires the appropriate membership level.
Bob Jenkins
p.s. For more strategies on how to get going with DAP, check out my Digital Access Pass training course.
I’ve used DAP and I have found it to be extensively buggy and problematic. DAP basically killed my membership site and I cannot recommend nor suggest to anyone else serious about their business to use this tool. DAP is a separate system that sets seperately from WP and requires extensive knowledge of its framework to get it to do anything even remotely like its supposed to. We’ve had endless code updates and fixes over the year we used it (My last count was 18 installs and code fixes).
The thing to know about DAP is it has an extensive learning curve, its not intuitive or easy as your review suggests. I’ve really pushed DAP in my attempts to make it work for us – I’ve built all different configs in order to find workarounds to its extensive limitations and I can tell you it is not the least bit secure or sturdy.
Often times the developer has to install it for you because it’s not just a simple, straightforward install.
There is a lot of guesswork and fiddling around as the product is not well-documented beyond the very minor basics. If you are looking to set it up exactly as the developer has in mind fine, but you have to both be a mind reader and understand the logic behind its design, neither of which is remotely documented well. If you attempt to build an extensive, robust membership program, this will not work for you. Save your money and don’t use this program.
Another example of its extensive coding illogic includes: email addresses slightly mistyped blowing up the entire admin interface and you cannot access it. You remain at the whim and timeline of a developer who is really just too busy to resolve the core problem. Their solution – simply remove the email address. I have never heard of a system dying due to a mistyped email address. It’s crazy. There are no errors, nothing, it just disappears.
There’s been endless amounts of problems with corrupted cookies, endless log-in looping errors and extensive hassles trying to even get these basic problems addressed, much less fixed. We have hundreds of support requests that come in weekly due to these corruption issues.
In order to resolve the problems, we had done everything the dap team suggested, even moving to a completely dedicated server, reinstalling dap no less than a dozen times and using all kinds of different configurations to solve the problems. They refuse to accept or acknowledge their code is at fault.
They ultimately gave up supporting their own software and on top of that refused to refund our money. Now they just hack it here and there, crossing their fingers that these poorly thought out bandages will make the problem just disappear, rather than searching for and resolving the core framework issues to begin with.
If you are serious about building a membership site, realize the entire platform is a matter of life or death to your business. You risk your brand, your personal reputation on a membership platform. Because of this, it must be robust, secure, and most importantly stable.
DAP is an immpature program that needs core stability and security before adding a bunch of features. But it appears they’ve just been adding a bunch of flash and dash without stabilizing the core program itself.
I for one as a former custoemr do not appreciate being a guinea pig beta tester on my live production website for hacks and fixes to something that should have been well planned and architected carefully from the beginning. I’ve spent countless hours troubleshooting these problems.
I finally had someone with enough expertise look at the dap code and he found extensive problems in the base logic and handling of data. He said the core problems are so integrated with the system that it would require a complete rebuild of the entire platform in order to resolve. He believes that if you add any kind of strain to its delicate system – as my personal experience proved – it would crash the entire house of cards down around the users ears. His words, not mine.
Lenny – I second that about DAP it simply SUCKS! I wasted many weeks trying to get it to work right. It failed to protect categories, the partial content protection does not work like it is suppose to, huge problems in so many areas. And I won’t even get into support – they give far too many excuses blaming my wordpress theme (3rd most popular on the Web) as the issue. Sorry Ravi, it is not my theme its your buggy script!!!
When anonymous trolls start posting unsubstantiated remarks, and your software starts showing up on torrent sites, you know you’ve arrived
For those who are wondering about the above nasty comments from “seemingly” real customers who don’t even have the guts to use real names or link to their web site (oh, suddenly they don’t care about incoming link juice any more, eh?) search around some more on the web.
And also check out the testimonials page on our site for reviews from “real”, named, legitimate people
And yes, go ahead and call us at the phone # on our web site. Yup, we will pick up the phone, and answer your questions. Because we care. And we always have. And we always will.
- Ravi Jayagopal
Co-Founder & Co-Developer
Digital Access Pass