The War between WordPress & WP Engine, just further boosted my drive to focus the remainder of the year and entire 2025 to roll out a couple of subscription services.
My brother, Subscription services is the way to hit $1m or more easily, it would have been fintech but its too saturated already.
There’s so much money in building a system or product people love and they are enjoying it by subscribing monthly.
Here’s a brush up of the wár.
WP Engine makes over $400m annually.
WordPress founder’s networth is just a little around $400m
WP Engine, is a different company offering hosting services for people with wordpress sites. They host about 70% of all wordpress sites in the world.
WordPress on the other hand is an Open source platform where you can build sites on, as a matter of fact more than 70-80% of all websites on earth are built with wordpress, including government sites, banking sites etc.
Issues started when WordPress saw that WP Engine was making so much money and was donating so little or nothing at all to Wordpres, and they sounded like “WordPress Engine” and because of them (WordPress) they (WP Engine) are making so much money, but the board at WP Engine is not making enough donations towards WordPress.
As a matter of fact, it was just $75k they donated last and it was for a Wordcamp event just to be super admin sponsors not even for WordPress,.
WP Engine, says they owe WordPress nothing, as their voluntary support of event is more than enough.
WordPress says the use of WP gives WP engine some leverage parading themselves as WordPress-owned, and they should be obligated on their own to make more donations to WordPress.
hmmmm..
CEO of WordPress, wrote a few articles against WP Engine, and any article from wordpress .org displays on the dashboard of all WordPress sites owners.
WP Engine decided to deactivate that news-widget for all it’s customers at WP Engine so that they won’t see the ongoing rift between them and WordPress.
Because of that,
WordPress owner was angered, they disabled WP Engine’s server from being able to add/update plugins, themes and other things from WordPress Api (this on its own is a major blow, because their rift is affecting WPE users), imagine using a plugin with vulnerability and a new version comes out, you can’t update it and your site would face the attacks.
Many users were cr-ying because they’d have to move away from WPE to be free from the ongoing rift, and it was WPE obligation to protect its users but they might not be able to since people can’t easily update plugins and themes.
However, WordPress has lifted the API blocks until October 1st, if WP Engine does not play to their tune, then, they would find a way to make their users enjoy free update of plugins and themes without going through WordPress API.
NOTE: WordPress does not have trademark of the term WP, but they have sought trademark for “Hosted WordPress” and “Managed WordPress” which may also affect WP Engine and other brands who wants to use that phrase in marketing their products.
Also, i think this is now a personal beef between CEO of WordPress and the Boards at WP Engine, it’s looking really childish, since other sites, companies and brands use WP in their names e.g WP Forms, WPBeginner etc.
WordPress now wants reparation and payments from WP Engine, because the contributors at WordPress works over 40hours a week to keep the entire WordPress secure and updated, so they need every money they could possibly get.
Now, if WP Engine bows to pressure, it means other brands like WP Form etc would be waiting for their own ordeal from WordPress aswell.
What do you think?
~ Fidelis.
