On the article, the author wrote:

> Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce.... 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.

> 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.

Yes, it contains Premium support, premium themes, commerce, payment support and automatic backups, but how many of those features you'll actually utilize? Why would you want to purchase their automatic backups when you already have a system that backs things up better? Why should you pay for their commerce system when you already using a better third-party one?

It's not "But it's loaded with features" here, instead it's "Yes, it's loaded with features. But I (author) don't need most of it".

Everything is getting more expensive these days.

My electricity price increased 50%. I did not get any extra features.

>>For me the problems are the massive reduction in storage from 3GB to 0.5GM along with this new notion of maximum views, set quite low. I think those two combined will likely drive a lot of people away.

>> Me too I am only seeing my storage as 500mb and I have had a free site since 2013.

Those people are whining because they have used service for almost ten years and never paid a penny for it. People should understand that things are never free forever.

500MB is enough for free plan. If you use more then it is reasonable to get premium plan or host it somewhere else for cheaper.

Hosting text content online has been essentially free for two decades, and storage and bandwidth only got cheaper. $180/y is enough to serve a billion pageviews.

Unless you now have the overhead of a massive VC-funded organization that needs to grow and hit the expected return multiples. People are “whining” because this is a 180° turn from Wordpress’ origins and their mission of “democratizing publishing”.

It is also a ton of money for anyone outside the US and EU - it’s one month’s rent in most of Brazil.

I used to offer free image hosting and when I ended it, I got a lot of insults and bitching from freeloaders.

Giving away something for free, is something I will never do again.

Indian people were infamous sending their dick pics.

>Everything is getting more expensive these days.

Storage gets cheaper per MB

The opposite goes for offering the storage with traffic. AWS, gcloud, azure everyone had price adjustment last year especially on the storage side of things.

You’re saying AWS increased prices on something? Citation needed. They famously don’t do that.

They did have a price adjustment on storage, though… a 31% reduction for some use cases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/s3-storage-class-price-...

Then why Dropbox, Google, OneDrive many other cloud providers have cut back their free packages?

Most likely, they want to make more money, and they no longer care how many free users they lose as long as some of them convert to paid customers.

Free users aren't generating revenue for them. In the past, it seemed like businesses had this idea that infinite free users would somehow lead to infinite revenue, but they seem to be moving away from this philosophy.

Storage has been getting cheaper every year. If a business is skimping on their free plan, it's not because of rising storage costs.

They were abused as DDL warez host that's mainly why they dialed back on the storage.

There's no monthly payment option. So it's never $15 a month, it's $180 a year.

Also, what if I don't want many of those features? And I don't. This is why the previous plans, which were more graded, made sense. The annual billing option on the other hand caters to customers in need of all these features, who are also likely to be the sort of people who'd be willing to pay $180 at a go.

The $6 option can add on domains for each new crackpot idea at no additional cost so that is a bonus.

But I prefer hostgator. Maybe not as performant but it effectively serverless 0.1 tech that makes it easy to add sites and administer.