And maybe an optional follow-up if you’re up for it.
Automattic, the makers of Jetpack and many other WordPress-y things, have sponsored my site (me = Chris Coyier; site = CSS-Tricks) for quite a while. I use Jetpack myself, and I’m always trying to tell people about its features and benefits.
Yet I get the sense that there is a decent amount of hesitancy (or even general negative feelings) toward Jetpack. I want to hone in on that and understand it better. This will be useful for me in my attempt to be a good sponsoree, and useful for Automattic to improve Jetpack.
Fill out my online form.
I love using Jetpack and have for years, and it’s likely that I will continue to do so in most cases for my clients, but pricing is quickly becoming an issue. Luckily I have a few legacy yearly subscriptions which I understand will change eventually, but they’ve jumped the yearly price twice rather significantly over the past two years.
I really only use it for Backups, Scans, and Spam. The Premium was $99/year in the past. Then it jumped to $239/year when they changed their pricing tiers. Now it will be $300/year for Security Daily and it’s getting much harder to sell that to clients. I realize you receive a great discount on the first year but a 40% jump in expense for the following year is just as impactful as the discount on the first.
They run a great system and their support is fantastic. They’ve never really let me down. You get what you pay for and people who do good work should be paid properly. I just wish there was a cheaper tier for those who only need security, backups, and spam protection. If you buy those separately it ends up being $360/year. I don’t use any other feature in most cases. Well, the traffic is nice to see, but most of my clients use GA anyway.
The latest version of Jetpack broke down the newspaper site of a client. I’m not offering support for the site, I just designed and coded it, but anyways, the client panicked & called me for help. Had to downgrade to the previous version, but the it took to the site almost a half day to completely recover (you know how complicated is to clear cashes in Cloudflare, etc). The guy is paying the plugin only to be told that there is a known issue that will be fixed with the next release.