New users on the free plan will need to work within the confines of the 500MB storage limit or pay $180/year for the upgrade. The cost savings only affects users who were already paying. “The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.” This plan currently has no option for monthly billing. “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),” Martin said. He also said the traffic limits will “only be enforced on the honor system.” Users who consistently go over the monthly cap will be prodded with notices to pay more, but their sites will not be shut off. Martin said generally adjusts its subscription plan pricing to make it affordable in different regions of the world but neglected to do so for the new Pro plan. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another. 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 with no real strategy. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes. That said, we’re not done making changes. Yes, as of this week we’ve gone from 5 plans down to just 2. 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. CEO Dave Martin responded to these concerns on Hacker News, apologizing for the lack of communication in the rollout: But to be honest, the hindsight doesn’t explain why – 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. 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. In the absence of communication about the change, VM speculated that it may be a cascading effect of the block editor changing how well commercial themes can be monetized: This may be a bug in the rollout but at the time of publication, has not published a public notice the price changes beyond updating the pricing page. Although representatives have confirmed that the storage and traffic limits should only affect new sites, many long-time users have reported that their storage has been cut back to 500MB. Other users took to the forums to express frustrations with the new pricing. “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).” “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,” VM wrote. In a post titled “ What are you doing, ?” one user identified as “VM” expressed concerns about the pricing, which has changed from five plans to two plans, and slashed storage on the free tier from 3GB to 500MB. Over the weekend, a post regarding ’s as yet unannounced pricing changes went viral on Hacker News.
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