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".
We did however publish an update on our support forums, which you can find here: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/pricing-feedback/
I will circle back to this thread with additional updates as they are shared publicly.
That is not as reassuring as people seem to think it is.
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.
Here's the last discussion I read, there's a link from dang to another, related thread.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Vimeo user, so I'm not in a position to know if the whole thing was overblown or not.)
This is leadership.
Also, a good example of the sort of attitude we've come to expect from WP folks, and from which the sudden Pro-plan changes departed.
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.
> 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.
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.