Tag: Pro plan

2.5 weeks since WP.com’s price revision

WordPress.com squandered the trust of bloggers it had accrued for almost a decade (approx. since the advent of their Calypso editor) with the decision to introduce the Pro plan the way it did. There were many proclamations – direct and indirect – in between, chiefly by Automattic CEO Matt Maullenweg, about how this trust was important to the company. Now I’ve got to think that the Pro plan rollout was a true reflection of how WordPress.com perceived the trust, and wonder how WordPress.com will treat hobby bloggers in future.

The most popular request in responses to WordPress.com’s post on its blog and CEO Dave Martin’s post in the forums is that WordPress.com needs to bring back its old plans (which the Pro plan replaced) quite simply because none of the users found them confusing. I tend to agree. Both Martin and Mullenweg have said that WordPress.com created the Pro plan because the old plans were confusing – but considering I’m yet to come across a WordPress.com blogger who feels the same way, I suspect this is something WordPress.com wanted to do to “score the investors a higher multiple”, but which “seems like a move that is incongruent with the mission statement and the strengths of the existing brand” (source). And once they made this decision, they retconned it by claiming that it was what bloggers wanted. I’m glad all the bloggers in the post comments and on the forum spoke up.

Third, there are some WordPress.com staff members who are periodically encouraging WordPress.com users to keep sharing their feedback as responses on the forum. The WordPress.com blog post also said that they’re listening to users’ feedback, implying that users should keep it coming. I found this heartening at first but now, almost three weeks since the abrupt price change, these calls seem disingenuous. How much feedback does WordPress.com really need to understand the extent to which it screwed up? If it’s a lot, then it would mean the company screwed up big time. (I think this might be a valid concern based on this line in Martin’s forum post {emphasis added}: “We plan to test adding monthly pricing back in, but we don’t have a specific date for this just yet.”) Surely it’s the responsibility of the top management to obviate such a tremendous need for feedback by anticipating what it is that its users want. This also makes me doubt the short surveys that used to appear on the WordPress.com dashboard and what the people running it took away from the responses.

It’s annoying that WordPress.com staff constantly ask for feedback to be given right now, instead of in the many, many years in which bloggers were happily publishing on the platform. This is exacerbated by the fact that none of the staff members are able to provide a deadline for changes to the Pro plan, which I can only take to mean that the company didn’t anticipate any of these changes.

What are you doing, WordPress.com?

Be sure to check out the update at the bottom.

I recently wrote that I’ve stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business, with the right ideals. (To the uninitiated, here’s an explanation of the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.) But in the last two or three days, WordPress.com has jolted both these beliefs with a surprisingly wide-ranging rejig of its paid plans.

Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce. The free plan came with no custom domain and 3 GB of storage – which is great for people looking to just write and publish and because WordPress.com subdomains had tenancy: it kept them alive even if the blogs at those locations had long died and it didn’t, and still doesn’t, allow people to register a subdomain that used to be owned by someone else and has since been deleted.

But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB. It also imposed a traffic ceiling on both plans where none existed: 10,000 visits a month and 100,000 visits a month (and it hasn’t said anything about overages – so far). As these changes were rolled out to user dashboards over the weekend, many users have also reported that the changes had been imposed on their old blogs as well, whereas the norm is to grandfather old user accounts with preexisting subscriptions (i.e. allowing them to continue on those plans and restricting the new plans to new users). There hasn’t been any official announcement from WordPress.com either about what we’re seeing, whether these users’ experiences are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we should have seen this coming: the new full-site editing option has rendered premium themes, and thus the premium and business plans redundant; the Gutenberg upgrade allowed users on free as well as personal plans to do some of the things that were previously only possible with premium or business plans. But to be honest, the hindsight doesn’t explain why WordPress.com – whose free plan, pro-open-source stance and focus on making publishing technology more democratic made it many a modern (non-technical) blogger’s host of choice – would pull the rug out like this.

I for one am particularly bummed because neither the storage space nor the traffic cap on the free plan work for me. The Pro plan currently has only an annual payment option (the older plans had monthly options) and it costs Rs 13,800 a year. I could arrange to spare this much money every year, sure, but it’s a ridiculous amount to pay for WordPress.com’s features – especially those I will really need to use.

Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks. The next-best thing for me to do right now is to find and move to a well-reputed, reliable managed hosting provider, but there’s a reason this wasn’t the best option to begin with, which is what we stand to lose right now: WordPress.com “being there” for bloggers who just want to blog, without being in need of any of the complicated features that businesses seem to need, and WordPress.com being both a good-spirited technology company (unlike, say, Medium or Wix) out there whose prices were entirely reasonable.

On a related note, I’m also frustrated because WordPress.com had recently reduced its paid plans’ rates for the Indian market. For example, the business plan of old cost around Rs 7,400 a year whereas the new Pro plan, which matches the business plan feature for feature (plus an e-commerce option), costs Rs 13,800 a year, i.e. effectively going from $8.x a month to $180 a year. Again, this may be great for businesses – but it’s a shit move for bloggers. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, recently said in an interview: “I’ll tell you a stat most people don’t realize. Half of all users who sign up for WordPress.com every day are there to blog.” I’ll tell you that for all of these people as well as the people who are using WordPress.com to blog (including me), the new plan is a betrayal of our interests.

Update, April 3, 2022, 7:46 pm: WP.com CEO Dave Martin responded to this blog post after it went big on Hacker News (thanks!) here. Gist: traffic limits based on honour system, region-specific plans en route (vis-à-vis the separate rates in India), à la carte options on free plan coming soon, and communication wasn’t great. I already feel a bit better than when I wrote this post. I’ve also asked Dave to adapt his reply on HN for an update on the WP.com blog – I’ve been checking it regularly for an announcement on the Pro plan and I’m sure others have been as well.