I had been a customer - for a decade or more - of a company that WP Engine acquired. A couple of years after the acquisition I began to get persistent - VERY persistent - calls and emails from their ‘product specialists’ who were determined to get me a “better deal”.
It turns out that their idea of a better deal was to move me onto a more expensive plan with lower limits than the plan I’d been on for 10+ years. They kept trying. I kept saying “I’m not interested”. But I got tired out of their constant spamming. So I left.
Over my time with them I’d spent somewhere in the region of $40k I think. I referred a fair few people to them as well. Not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things I realise, but you’d think it would count for something. Apparently not.
I’m no longer a customer of WP Engine. I could have stayed another ten years. I’m taking my next $40k and spending it elsewhere.
I was a customer of that same company that was acquired by WPengine. It had the highest ever performance benchmarks and customer approval until WPE got hold of it. I had also used WPE a couple of times earlier in its history. The service has always been bad. The business model has increasingly become squeezing the customer far beyond the point where any meaningful quality can be delivered. This year support has turned from aggressive upsells to aggressive blaming the customer for simply running the same software they've had in place for over a decade. WPE has a lot of shared hosting hidden behind its marketing cover. Classic old multitenancy problems. No one with any technical awareness and experience in WP hosting will say different. I ran into a former Flywheel tech at WCUS and heard their story of the dumpster fire that is WPE from the inside. Not surprised they fired a contributor from saying WPE as an employer discourages contributing to WordPress.
I really loved Flywheel. Everyone I interacted with from sales to support was extraordinary. It must have been very sad for the folk working there to have the company gutted by WPE.
I had a different experience from what Matt is talking about - people being confused when I told them "just use WordPress" and instead of going to wordpress.org they went to wordpress.com, not to WP Engine. I don't think Matt is being completely sincere here and just wants to bash the WordPress-as-a-service competition here.
Companies profiting off Open Source is a very common pattern. Look at AWS (amazon web services) long list of 'managed' services, and there are quite a few open-source candidates. I'm not saying Amazon is not adding anything to benefit users there, they are, but adding a management layer (with all their in-place templates/patterns for similar things) - wouldn't be a huge development or research effort - contrast that to developing the original code from scratch.
Then there will be engineers who will get certified on this tech, training companies, and the ecosystem just keeps taking root, where the source of the innovation is all but forgotten.
The owner of WPEngine is investing in billions - and they are contributing relatively little to the software that they never wrote, but got for free.
I run a WP focused agency and can say that apart from the absolutely shitty sales tactics WPEngine are a solid choice for probably 90% of the sites out there.
The criticism outlined by Matt in this article is related to their lack of engagement with the open source community around WordPress and their unwillingness to significantly contributing to the project.
I seriously had no idea they only contributed a tiny amount (40 hours per week) and I know of other (larger) agencies like mine who do more than this so I hope WPE pull their finger out and implement a better strategy to give back.
In my past non-profit we used WPEngine, that was about 10 years ago. Yes they were expensive but we didn't have people, nor did I (a backend python guy) want to mess with websites and be on the critical path. If I had been aware of, or known how this company was profiting from Open Source, I'd have taken my business elsewhere. Roughly 1K per year, base plan at the time, so, not a huge amount. We were broke, so there was no question of upgrades.
I wonder if this sort of thing is ultimately going to shrink the market share of Wordpress.
Drupal has a similar setup where the founder of the open source project also founded a company (Acquia) and took many $millions of investment. It created a lot of confusion in the market about what would be the terms of competition… how benevolent the open source “overlord” would remain.
As Acquia grew its footprint, I knew quite a few companies who diverted investment from Drupal into other CMS ecosystems. Ironically Wordpress was the beneficiary of a lot of that. Within a couple years every “Drupal agency” I was aware of was doing Wordpress too. And every “Drupal host” had expanded into Wordpress or general hosting. Look around… Drupal ain’t dead but it’s not spreading anymore either. I know there were other factors, but I also know Acquia was a factor, at least commercially.
Investors and entrepreneurs need a clear runway in front of them to feel comfortable making large investments. Matt seems to be planting himself in the Wordpress runway, at minimum as a gatekeeper and possibly as a straight-up obstacle. He’s trying to wear the open source hat as he does this, but everyone can see the Automattic hat too. Even if he is doing this with the best of intentions, I think it will not have a positive effect overall.
Other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628
[dupe]
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628
As much as he may be right, this attack is in very poor taste coming from the CEO of the main competitor. By all means provide a feature comparison table and let customers make their minds up, but calling your competitor a “cancer” based on them not doing much open source work, or based on the company that owns them, that’s a moral judgement that competitors shouldn’t be making about each other in public.