WordPress: Starter Plan – Paying More for Less

Posted on by Aywren

Previous Posts About WordPress Plan Changes:

Well, we’re back on the WordPress train again. This time, the big news – properly announced in their blog – is of the new Starter Plan.

Priced at $5 a month, it sits between the free plan and the business plan at an acceptable price point.

This is a good move, based on customer feedback. However, the problem comes with the fact that this Starter Plan, while nicely priced for a hobby blog, is more expensive than the previous Personal Plan and provides less features.

Namely, the Starter Plan does not remove ads from your blog. It also drops Jetpack Essentials. It’s interesting that you have to click the Full Plan Comparison button to see all this info on the plan page, though.

Compared to the previous personal plan which had:

Okay, wow. That doesn’t look like such a great deal anymore, does it?

WordPress keeps talking about the a la carte options they plan to add in the future. I’m sure one of those will be removing ads from your blog. Which means for an additional fee on top of your monthly plan, you can remove the ads. I think that’s pretty bogus.

If I pay money to host my blog, I expect the default state of the plan to remove ads – along with connecting domain name and a bit more space. I consider that very vanilla baseline for a paid plan.

If they want to include “no ads” as a a la carte option for those who don’t care about domains and space, that’s fine. Just don’t tack it on to a plan I’m already paying for as an extra cost.

I’ve left my thoughts on the official blog post and I encourage you to do the same if you feel similarly. WordPress wasn’t going to offer a Starter plan to begin with, but the resounding feedback they got from their previous change has led to this.

So please, please, lend your voice to this. If they listened once, they might listen again. I sure hope they do.

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