Pricing Feedback
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I know I’m not the target demographic anymore because I moved to self-hosting 2 years ago, but I was exactly having this decision I woudl be having now: Go with the cheapest plan that allows me to use my own domain (I don’t have more than 200MB of files and I don’t have 10k visitors, for reference) or go off to self-host. With this change there wouldn’t even be a lot of thinking to do anymore. The price hike from the old cheaper plans is actually massive if you’re not using all the features and I hope you’ve analyzed your user base well enough, because for low-traffic hobbyist blogs 15 bucks is kind of ridiculous. (Not for pro/business users, but I’m not speaking for them).
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I have three plans:
One is my personal website, which shows off the work I do (I’m a journalist). I had the $25 Business plan, and that’s going down to $15 with the Pro plan.
One is a site I run for an author. It was costing $10, on the Premium plan, which was $10 a month. He would pay the $15, but will be happing staying on the legacy Premium plan, since all he really needs is a custom domain.
The third is a “hobbyist” site on the Personal plan ah $4 a month. No way would I pay $15 a month for that site; it gets very little traffic. I have a custom domain, which means that there is no other option currently.
Overall, this doesn’t affect me too much, but I certainly understand people with small sites who see their cost go up drastically. And as I said in a comment above, there’s nothing for sites that get more than 100K page views (give or take, because apparently this won’t be rigid) except for the VIP plans that start at $2,000. There’s a huge gap, and it feels like the VCs came in and imposed pricing to make anyone using WordPress.com for business pay a lot more.
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Glad to finally see some official information about this change, even more glad to see you guys seeking feedback.
I’ll start by saying that I’ve had an account here for 14 years (my blog just notified me of this last week) during which I’ve had an assortment of both paid and free blogs. My main blog – which I moved from a self-hosted environment in 2017 due to the features WP.com offers – is currently a Premium legacy account, and I have been content with what this plan offers.
I have been an advocate for WP.com to friends, family, and new bloggers alike. I’ve recently been really excited about the full site block editing and have been blogging about all these nice developments – I fully appreciate the WP platform and what it can do.
However, the (stealth) changes to pricing and plans is not something I can get behind. Something like this should have been announced way in advance – even Netflix tells me months ahead when a price hike is coming. I understand you want to test things before announcing them, but that’s why you write something up that says things are subject to change.
Please, please, don’t make customers have to search the support forum to try to piece together something as important as pricing changes.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I noticed the bug where an existing free blog told me I’d been cut from 3gig to 500mb media space, and set out to figure out what in the world was happening. The only information I could find were responses on this forum to other upset users.
I get that you want to make pricing plans less complicated. I’m actually behind consolidating your business plans to a cheaper price point and I congratulate you for that. But where’s the price points for smaller bloggers like myself?
If you do have some other pricing options like your above FAQ notes, why did it not all release at once? That’s the stuff I’m really interested in knowing as a small blogger paying for a plan.
Not everyone is business tier – I know that I am not going to pay double what I’m already paying for my small hobby blog. I am already investigating self-hosted options should I need to make a move – though I really, really don’t want to.
I’m glad to see that legacy folks can keep their plans, but what does that mean for us going forward? How long will you respect us being grandfathered in at our price point? Do the visit limitations apply to us?
Seeing that MOST of your paid users are now considered legacy, we need a FAQ about what that means for us, and soon.
I can understand some of the changes made to free accounts. But if you felt 3gigs was too much to hand out, 500mb is way too far the opposite direction. As a blogger, I can blow through 500mb faster than you think just with normal blogging. What then?
The only option for a free hobby blogger is to step up to $15 a month – paid yearly with no monthly option anymore – and that math doesn’t add up. They’re not going to make that kind of jump, and you’re going to lose a potential customer. There needs to be a blogger tier priced at a point like Personal was – at the very least.
I’m also not happy with limiting the number views even for your $15 plan – and not knowing whether that means a page load or a visitor. Part of what I was looking for as a blogger that moved from self-hosting was not being capped on bandwidth.
Apologies for this long post – I’ve not been a happy camper about this at all – much of it the lack of communication. I appreciate you giving us a place to offer our feedback and hope to see information to come.
Thank you for taking any of this into consideration.
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There’s a huge gap, and it feels like the VCs came in and imposed pricing to make anyone using WordPress.com for business pay a lot more.
kirkmc, I hope this isn’t the direction things are going. I don’t believe it is, but I did have the same initial thought when I saw the Pro plan with caps and no mention of paid upgrades from there.
Below the new pricing is WordPress VIP so it does currently leave you to think that VIP will be the only option for sites that go over the new limits.
More information will definitely be welcome, but after doing the work of scraping together bits and pieces of info like many in this thread have done, It looks to me like there won’t be much to worry about.
Why are prices changing?
Our mission is to both democratize publishing & commerce and to make WordPress.com the best place in the world to host a WordPress site.This sums it up nicely and I imagine in the coming weeks and months we’ll learn more. What I’ve seen so far imo is good news or no news. It’s the no news part that makes you wonder.
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In general customers do not like ambiguity and do not like surprises.
I know this will feel like a radical suggestion, and I’ve been a customer for more than 15 years so I know you guys just love to push updates then maybe do an announcement a few days later, but perhaps work on announcing things first, with details and how it affects your current paying customers, then deploying once that has been communicated. Give it a try. It won’t hurt you.
Seriously, you make more trouble for yourself and your “happiness” engineers by changing things without announcement. Or at least announce your changes internally. Your support tends to be very much a deer in the headlights scenario when things like this hit, as though you’ve left them off the update list as well.
Also, bravo for pushing this change without preamble on April Fools Day. There should be an achievement unlock for that!
As for ambiguity, there is still quite a bit in that FAQ. I am welcome to stay on my legacy plan, which I plan to do since it is about half the price of the Pro plan without any real benefit to induce me to upgrade, but are there new limits on my site? Am I also restricted to 100K visits? And what is a “visit” in any case? Is that a page view, a daily unique user, or some other metric? Use the terminology in our stats, don’t grab new words that you think mean the same thing but might not.
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One reason why I always recommended wordpress.com (among other things) was not having to worry about traffic. That’s a thing of the past, apparently, even when paying for your blog.
Also, you are penalizing people for having a successful blog! Either you can pay for more traffic or you can’t. But you’re staying ambiguous. As others said: What counts as a visit? And what *exactly* happens when you regularly go over? How much will it cost? When I go somewhere else for hosting, I can always see exactly how much I need to pay for which amount of traffic.
As I see it, you’re going from four paid plans (personal, premium, business and eCommerce) to one (or two? Will eCommerce stay?). So basically “one size fits all” – here’s a hint: It never does. Hobby blogs were mentioned. I, for example, made a conscious choice not to monetize my blog. That is also why I’m paying to have ads removed (“free” blogs aren’t that free, after all, as there are ads placed on your blog instead – which is fine, of course!). Having the option of having ads OR having to pay 15 € a month, that’s quite a lot!
I, like others, would also like to know whether I can stay on my legacy plan forever or not.
And you mentioned the possibility of à la carte options in the future. We’ll have to see them to be able to say whether that’s good or not. But it sounds to me like you’re then making it more complicated again.
Altogether, I am very disappointed with the lack of communication. If you didn’t want to say anything in advance, then at least give us the information at the same time that you’re introducing the change. But not days later! This way, it also didn’t make your company look too competent: FAQs etc. were outdated with the pricing page showing prices and plans that weren’t mentioned anywhere else and the storage space contradicting what was said in support articles.
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I’m on a free plan as I am a hobby blogger and have been since 2013.
I pay nothing, and would like a direct answer to my questions please:Do I still have the 3GB of capacity ?
Are my views now capped at 10,000? Why should I pay should more people read my blog?IMO this is a very badly thought out ‘plan’.
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Hi @pensitivity101 happy to clarify that existing free sites created before March 31 2022 are unchanged.
I see your site is about 9 years old (which is awesome!) and can confirm that it still retains the 3GB limit on media storage, and no limits on traffic.
To further clarify, the new limits would apply if you created a new (second) site under your account. The new limits would also apply if you upgrade your existing site, but as long as you keep https://pensitivity101.wordpress.com/ a free site there is no change whatsoever, as mentioned above.
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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I was alerted to these changes by another blogger. I’m just a small blog with about 250 followers and my views per day are well below 300. That said, how would spam commenters be handled? There was a brief time when I was getting nearly 50 spam comments a day, would those be held against my limit? If so then how is WP going to filter them out to protect my limit? As for putting a cap on visits/comments, it seems counter to the mission to make WP more democratic especially for the non-business bloggers. I realize the Block Editor was designed to make business blogs easier to insert ads and other revenue generating items but it was a disaster for all the little bloggers. Now this. I’m very reluctant to leave WP but if I’m faced with having to pay nearly $200/year, the decision will have been made for me. As for storage limits, I’m not even close to the 3 GB limit but that said I’d hate to have to delete images to be able to add more. And for the way these changes have (not) been communicated – Shame on WP. It is quite duplicitous!
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Hi @murisopsis thank you for that feedback, which we will take into consideration. For now though I’d like to address this directly:
how would spam commenters be handled? There was a brief time when I was getting nearly 50 spam comments a day, would those be held against my limit? If so then how is WP going to filter them out to protect my limit?
As mentioned in the original post, these are “soft” traffic limits, and also something that is not yet set in stone as we gather feedback. However, we currently filter “bot traffic” out of your site stats, so that the visits you see recorded on your stats page represent real people who are visiting your site.
Since most spam comments on your site are created by bots (and not actual humans) I can’t see a reason why that would every be counted against you. Hope this helps clarify!
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I understand the hassle of maintaining a free plan plus four paid plans, but to move from there to a scaled-back free plan and an expensive “professional” plan geared toward business users and e-commerce seems extreme. I’m on the Personal plan now and it very much meets my needs as a casual “hobby” blogger. Why not meet in the middle and offer three plans: Free, Pro, and a third plan that is like a hybrid of the Personal and Premium plans. And charge $96/yr for that hybrid plan. I think that would meet the needs of a large percent of WordPress bloggers who don’t need or want all of the e-commerce bells and whistles, but are willing to pay for no ads, more media space, and a few other features of the Personal/Premium plans.
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@staff-totoro
If this decision has been made to and in the light to benefit WP users, why has the option to pay monthly been removed?
Makes it hard to trust a company when a statement is made and is said to only been done to try better our experience when I see no benefit at all to any user.
All I see is a company getting greedy and forcing it onto users to boost their profits
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Hi folks! I know we’ve been fairly quiet here. We’re focused on listening and making sure we’ve noted each point you’ve made here. Stay tuned for updates.
In the meantime, I personally just want to thank you all so far for the quality of your conversation here. Each one of you has taken time to say what you’re looking for and how we can do better, and you’ve done so without dehumanizing anyone. The context many of you have shared is very helpful too. It’s exactly the kind of feedback we need.
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I blogged my thoughts here, going into the uncertain future of my Free-plan site and how I’ve already moved my Personal-plan site off of WP.Com. But to reiterate:
I was saving money to buy a Personal plan for ~400yen/month which would let me remove ads and have a bit more space. Now, though, the Personal plan is gone. In fact, all the plans have merged into one Pro plan… that costs a whopping 1850yen/month. Yes, the new plan is a good deal if you are a Business-tier user who needs all the eCommerce bells and whistles. But for hobby blogs like this one that are not designed to make money, it’s a non-starter. My plan of someday upgrading is moot unless WordPress reinstates cheaper Personal packages.
Not only that, but the Free plan is going from 3GB of space to 500MB. [My free site] is currently grandfathered in with the old limit, but I have no idea if or when that Legacy status will go away. It also emphasizes that I should never upgrade this site to a Pro plan because then I won’t ever be able to go back to the Legacy 3GB.
The space limitation also kills a lot of the ideas I had for this site. I was thinking of hosting longer and more in-depth features, which would use more screenshots and images and thus, more space. I took for granted that I could always upgrade my WordPress plan in the future to get more space for a few bucks a month, but those options are gone now. Even if I stuck to [my current output], which uses a minimal amount of images per entry, I’d start running up against the 500MB limit within a year. It’s demoralizing to have the sword of Damocles dangling over a passion project I only recently started. It makes me feel like I should give up before investing even more time and effort into a doomed venture.
[…]
The options for hobbyists and personal bloggers gets slimmer year by year. Which is inevitable; times change, prices go up, investors need to see returns. It makes sense for WordPress to shift away from small fry like me in favor of its big-ticket customers. But boy oh boy is it depressing, if for no other reason than that we hobbyists are the ones who have been championing WordPress the longest and loudest. I still remember jumping ship from cafelog to WordPress because b2 stopped being updated. (Realizing how long I have Been Online made me turn to dust and blow away in the wind.) This pricing update (which still has not even received an official blog or e-mail announcement!) makes it pretty clear that hobby and private blogs are no longer welcome, which is a damn shame. The Internet will continue to shrink, becoming less interesting and more corporatized.
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Please can you check your currency conversion? The price for Pro shows as £15 (UK pounds) for me. This is not the same as $15 (US dollars); it’s quite a bit more.
I am waiting to see what paid add-ons are made available for the the free plan, before deciding what I think about the changes.
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I have just gotten back from work after a long day. I am tired. I have things to say, but I’m too tired to type them now.
I am a paying customer, and have been for a number of years.
I expect that this thread will still be open to receive my feedback on the weekend, and not closed because you “have all we need” or some other such nonsense.
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It feels like you’ve trapped us in the net with good prices and flexible options, and now you’re taking advantage of our loyalty. Not everybody needs a pro plan. Also, 150-180$ a year is huge for Romanian users. $15 in Romania means one-week groceries for one person.
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It’s still a bit high but not too bad.
Google currency converter says $15 plus 20% VAT is £13.72 not £15 but I guess exchange rates fluctuate and it’s not too far off.
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Pretty much everything I buy in the UK, that is from a US company like this, is a one to one equivalent to USD prices. The only exceptions are higher priced items, such as phones, computers, etc.
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