Howdy. My name is Dave Martin. I'm the CEO of WordPress.com.
VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com.
You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me.
Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes.
Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another.
Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post:
- No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing.
- As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP.
- Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying.
- Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere.
- The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.
- We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan.
Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns.
> Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost
That really needs to be transparent. Right after Vimeo's mess with this is a bad time to introduce vague language around this, and people will assume you mean "force upgrade to thousands-of-dollars enterprise plan".
As some of you suspected, getting an official blog post drafted and reviewed by those working on this project and by our legal department ended up being challenging on a Sunday. As a result, we didn't get a blog post shared today.
They don't mean that it's technically difficult, they mean that the language on the pricing page has legal consequences, and they need to be precise with their updates to that page.
Or "It's Sunday, and legal is unavailable, so for right now we're putting out a blog post and we'll update the pricing page early next week."
Plus, if the pricing changes per-location as stated, that's significantly more complicated, and not something that can be done in a few hours over the weekend. I'm inclined to cut them some slack, I felt the response posted upthread was OK. Has noone else worked with legacy systems? The large number of pricing plans being rolled out haphazardly over years is very believable to me, my current company had a pricing option buried deep in the site that nobody even remembered existed anymore, customer service actually brought that to my attention after a unrelated change broke billing for those customers.
That being said, if the changes proposed aren't updated on the pricing page by Tuesday, then it's safe to assume this is all meaningless PR fluff.
This comment thread is the core of what's wrong with nu-HN. The loudest and least informed are the quickest to make a comment and collect internet points. If you need a dopamine fix go to reddit.
I'm a Vimeo Premium customer and I seem to have missed the pricing mess -- can you fwd a link? I've been getting anxious about our Vimeo paid subscription.
A 50GB storage limit is not going to be a problem for most people, but the 100K hits limit is much too low for a paid plan. If you make the HN front page once or twice, you can easily bust that. There really shouldn't be a limit for a paid plan that costs $15/month, but if you're going to have a limit, at least make it based on bandwidth usage, not the number of hits. You're incentivizing successful bloggers to move away from your platform. Is that really what you want?
Caplan is the author of The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and he blogged regularly at Econlog for many years. His remarks are consistent with my own recent experiences; I've written on Wordpress since 2007: https://jakeseliger.com/ and, although I don't have the reach of Caplan, or have the need for some of the features Caplan does, I also find recent changes to be chalelnging. Two may not constitute a trend, but, if I were starting today, I'd use Substack or Ghost.
Did you mean "interest" in the sense of "cause for worry"? Or in the sense of " useful feedback"? Because this vague sort of complaint (the one with no detail given except of the posters importance) is only one of those, and not the useful one.
OT but perhaps interesting: When WP started Akismet perma-banned users from posting comments for adding links to comments. There was no appeal mechanism, when I got a hold of an employee they were unable to see if comments of mine got rejected nor why. It seems like something you would want to fix. The community (of about 50) that we moved to the platform died pretty fast and the bans are still in place.
Thanks for this! I started the day wondering if I was going to need to waste some brain cycles finding some new hosting for my near zero traffic blog, but this response answered pretty much all of my concerns.
> This response looks like it was generated by GPT-3 trained on a public relationships textbook.
> Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan.
> You "forgot"? That's laughable.
> "Own the crisis", "be honest" and so on. I don't trust like that. You messed things up. You are no longer credible. Fixing it isn't that simple.
This is an exceptionally belligerent reply (for HN). It's something that clearly shouldn't be tolerated on HN when communicating directly to another person.
There's a person on the other end of your abusive reply.
They made a mistake, therefore they're no longer credible. I pity the people in your world.
Plus, it's the weekend for God's sake. I would hope there are a lot of the team members that aren't available, and expecting instant response is unreasonable.
I interviewed with WordPress a couple years ago and given what I know about their work/life balance I would expect most people are not asked to work on weekends unless that's a regular part of their job. They seem to respect their employees' time.
I would guess the Venn Diagram of people like GP who have zero tolerance for it taking time on a weekend, are also quite overlapped with people who would loudly shout at OP for calling somebody in on a weekend to deal with a PR issue. "You asked someone to work on the weekend, therefore you have no credibility as a non-evil employer."
It's not just an ordinary person, it's the CEO of the company, whose priority is to manage its public image during the social media crisis after a callout. He has an interest in making anything that could just as well be deliberate appear to be accidental. I have no idea what the truth is, I simply take everything that a company representative says with a big grain of salt.
It's what they do that matter most. If they didn't fix it, and gave "credible" reasons for delaying, that would cross a threshold where such suspicions would be much more warranted. But a quick fix, well ... fixes that.
VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com.
You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me.
Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes.
Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another.
Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post:
- No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing.
- As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP.
- Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying.
- Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere.
- The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.
- We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan.
Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns.