WordPress.com announces it’s first pay feature

WordPress.com is the best freely hosted blog solution. That’s why I use it. They’ve always been saying they’ll eventually offer pay features to make money. Today’s feature announcements (new minimal Sandbox Theme , private user-level access controlled blogs, custom CSS for a fee) revealed the first pay feature.

One of the main advantages to running a wordpress.org self-hosted blog versus a wordpress.com multi-user blog is the ability to customize your layout via themes and install plug-ins. WordPress.com offers a limited selection of 38 themes. The themes are very inconsistent. Each theme supports different features and has different bugs. In fact, the only thing themes have in common is that they all seem to have bugs.
I wonder if the ability to customize CSS for a fee will deprioritize fixing theme bugs even further? I trust the guys at WP, but I know that fixing theme problems would be the last thing on my list if people could get around it by using custom CSS.

The price is a reasonable $15/year. The average cost for having a custom WordPress blog hosted professionally elsewhere is around $7/month. I’m assuming that once you’ve paid it is good for all of the blogs hosted on your user account, but it may be by individual blog.

Update: it is per blog, not per user.

I hope once they’ve added other wordpress.com “products” they start offering bundles. There should always be a bundle with all the wordpress.com products that is similiar in cost to hosting elsewhere.

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