See the Official WP Announcement.

Thanks to Jason for bringing to my attention that WP.com has finally made an official announcement about their new plans. And what I’m seeing there appears to be a vast improvement of what they were originally planning.

I’m not sure if they actually took our feedback to heart, but they sure seemed to be listening about the major things I had issues with.

Though they are set on only having two plans – Free and Pro – they are improving both plans by removing the proposed traffic limit on both. Thank you!

They also bumped up the storage for new Free accounts from 500mb to 1gig. This is still low, but better – 1gig is the least I’d expect from a blogging account. Interestingly, it’s exactly what I suggested in my feedback to them.

It seems that they are going to leave those of us on legacy plans as is. At least, that’s the impression I get.

For those of us hobby bloggers who feel $15 a month is too steep for something we’re just doing for fun, WP says they will be adding options a la carte (such as storage). We don’t know what those are just yet, but I’m assuming they will take the place of the mid-tier plan on down the line.

In the end, doing a la carte might even be more cost effective for hobby bloggers. We just need to know what they’re offering and for what price.

For example, I’m considering dropping the ads on my blog because as of late, WordAds have been performing terribly. I don’t know if this is because of the new layout or if it’s just a bad time for WordAds (it fluctuates). I have still have a year’s worth of pre-paid hosting left, and by then, WP should have worked out what all these as-you-need-them features will be. At that point, I’ll determine what I need and what the cost is.

I still feel like this should have been done before the plans were put in place. Maybe they should have announced it somewhere – “This is what we’re proposing, we’d like feedback” – then opened a thread to feedback, or just took comments on their blog post – and then announce the final plans based on tweaks.

I know I would have been a lot less frazzled by all this if that had been the method they took. However, though this was implemented poorly for the small group of us who knew what was going on, I will give them credit for seemingly taking into consideration what we had to say on the matter and making positive improvements.

Hopefully they’ll make these a la carte changes more widely known at an earlier time and have learned from this experience of making “stealth” changes. We told them we wanted communication about these changes, and they gave communication to us the next day with many of the changes we requested.

So. Credit where it’s due. It seems like WP is on a better track than it was last week. Whether that’s because bloggers spoke up, I don’t know. But I’d like to hope so.

Thanks to everyone who took some time to drop them feedback. <3