Question from Harry B.: Maybe you can answer a question for me Rick. I’ve been wondering about it for a long time.
About three years ago I paid to have a website built for me, and the lady built it using WordPress.
In all this time I’ve never been asked to pay anything to keep using the WordPress program.
I was just wondering how they make their money since they let us use their software for free? I’ve never seen them place any ads on my blog.
Rick’s answer: That’s a great question, Harry. I’m glad you asked it!
The company behind WordPress is Automattic, and according to their “About” page they currently have 1,504 employees located in 81 different countries around the world.
That means they’re obviously making a lot of money.
While the WordPress platform itself is completely free, Automattic offers a wide range of premium add-on products and services that enhance and protect WordPress blogs in various ways.
You can see a list of those premium services right on their home page. And I use a few of them myself (most notably VaultPress).
VaultPress is a combination WordPress plugin/backup service that makes either daily or continuous backups (depending on the plan you use) of your entire blog. It also includes a “one-click restore” feature for quickly getting your blog back online after disaster strikes.
WooCommerce is another popular plugin/service that’s a veritable “cash cow” for Automattic.
In a nutshell, WooCommerce makes it easy to use a WordPress site to run an online business.
VaultPress and WooCommerce provide just two of Automattic’s many revenue streams.
As you can see, they can easily afford to give WordPress away for free thanks to all the popular premium add-ons and services they offer to augment the millions of WordPress blogs that are up and running every day.
I hope this helps, Harry. Thanks again for such a great question!
Bonus tip: This post explains why I happily pay for the privilege of using VaultPress to back up my WordPress blogs.
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