> Additionally, it’s also ironic (hypocritical, I’d say) for him to complain about the lack of post revisions as something that undermines WordPress, while Automattic offers WordPress without access to plugins and all themes in its basic hosting plans, and makes Jetpack, a Trojan horse to upsell features (even the basics, like… stats), mandatory for all users.

It's absurd that they gate so many features behind their higher tiers.

Early this year I wanted to blog about something and was tired of my Ghost self-hosted blog. I decided that I was just going to pay someone else to host it and since I get like 100 visitors/week (if that) I really was put off by the pricing from so many blog providers that want to charge you based on visitors. Especially since my blog is read by normally either very few (<100) or it hits on somewhere like HN (rare but it's happened) and I have thousands of visitors for a day or two.

I finally settled on wordpress.com, I've used Wordpress in some form or fashion for 15+ years and so I thought it would be a good choice. I went ahead and paid for 3 years at once for the savings (bad idea) but then started running into issues. Want to see analytics? You need to pay for Premium or above. Want to upload video? Need to pay for premium or above. Want plugins (you know, a /massive/ aspect of wordpress)? You need to pay for business or above (Starting at $25/mo). Yes, I could have worked around some of the issues but in the end I paid for Premium so I could get my stupid little blog up and running. I'm still bitter to be paying that much for a rounding error of traffic blog and still not have plugins but whatever.

I don't know what I'll do in 2 years but I know it won't be wordpress.com. I'd rather deal with self-hosting again than give them another penny.