Forced Paywall New Stats

Hi @veex2,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the recent changes to Jetpack Stats. We know this shift can be tough, especially with the introduction of costs for commercial sites. Here’s a bit more context to help clarify our decision.

We introduced paid stats for commercial sites to support the ongoing development and improvement of Jetpack Stats. Our goal is to ensure that personal sites remain free while commercial sites contribute based on their traffic.

As you might alreayd know, we define commercial sites as those making money through ads, products, services, or donations. This classification helps us maintain fairness. Non-profits that don’t solicit donations have the option to pay what they want for stats.

If you believe your site’s classification isn’t accurate, you can request a re-evaluation from your site dashobad or you can share the site URL here so we can check it.

I hope this clarifies things, but if you have any other questions or need further assistance, just give us a shout. We’re here to help.

Thank you!

I understand the context of the decision and the intent. This doesn’t change that it misses the mark on how your team classifies commercial entities. The assumption is that every month everyone classed with a catalog only or a minor ecommerce platform is rolling in cash, as we’re in an actual slowdown through 2024 many aren’t, this move is likely inspired by that as well.

The issue is that assumption isn’t actually based in reality. This especially stands out for a site that I had impacted by this, I produced the site on my own out of pocket to make my life easier at work, I end up on a loss with it and now even the baseline for stats is beyond a stretch for something that was a convenience. While it was nice having Jetpack stats, the only thing it’s done is alienate me and make me skeptical of what might be taken away next. Your team might view it as what’s $100 a year for this feature? Well since it’s out of my pocket, it’s $100 for something that I will be able to live without as it’s not an essential product.

Worse is that currently for those that opt into the new stats unaware of what’s about to happen are stuck with no option to opt out as the slider to disable it is greyed out. So not only are their stats useless because of the prompt to pay, but they can’t even get rid of it. If the team can’t understand how that’s bad, I don’t know how to help you. Using a bypass was the only way to easily disable it at the time.

As a final note, for people with hosting plans like Jetpack Professional stats aren’t included and considered an upgrade, I can only imagine that as time goes on the team will continue to prune off included items. Generally that’s how this process goes, chip it away.

I wish your team the best with it but it’s not going to be for everyone and hopefully your team actually understands why. I’ve tried to express this in the beta before, I’ve been rejected countless times for consideration into the free program because apparently your team thinks I’m making millions and just being stubborn, I’m not, and many others aren’t as well.

Hello again @veex2,

To address your point about the Professional plan, please note that we’re working on bundling our commercial Stats plan with our legacy Professional plan.

Also, commercial Stats is already included with our Complete plan. This means that if you’re already on our Complete plan, you don’t need to worry about paying for Stats up to a certain limit.

Regarding your site’s classification, we’d be happy to take a closer look.

Could you please share your site URL with us so we can review it and see if we can provide any adjustments? We want to ensure that our classification system is as accurate as possible and when that’s not the case we do manual reviews to address any classification disputes.

Best regards,

@joseph

wait a second. Why didn’t support offer to look at my “commercial site”, too? I can’t even afford the lowest tier. i’ve already installed and using monsterinsights. im just here to read the new 1-Star ratings since they’re on FYA!!!

Hi @ricka

We would be happy to help. Could you please post your site URL here so that we can have a look?

If you want it to remain private, you can also contact us via this contact form:

https://jetpack.com/contact-support/?rel=support&hpi=1

If you choose to reach out directly, please include a link to this thread.

Thanks!

How do we our site re-evaluated? I submitted to have it checked, but it was still deemed “commercial”–which clearly it isn’t. I was then directed to contact support, but sent over to this generic JetPack support area.

Just a general commentary about the change:

For those of us who don’t make $$ off our sites, and pay out of our pockets to maintain our sites at great personal expense, this is a total slap in the face.

I get recouping costs from true commercial users. But IMHO, the team at JetPack making the decisions of what’s “commercial” and what’s not, really missed the mark.

All that JetPack is going to do is drive people away from your service. That will just make the WP universe a less secure space for all Internet users, since WP drives so many sites online. Just a thought.

Hi @bassicsax –

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We’ll pass it on to our product team.

Additionally, we’d be happy to take a look at your site. Please post a new thread on the support forum including your Site URL, and we’ll review it.

For those of us who don’t make $$ off our sites, and pay out of our pockets to maintain our sites at great personal expense, this is a total slap in the face.

I couldn’t agree more! I’m a hobbyist and blogging is my creative outlet. Yes, I have a couple of Google Adsense ads and also ask for donations, but in 11 years of blogging, I’ve made less that $100.00! On top of the hosting fees, a premium theme and a few pro plugins, there is NO WAY I can afford another $150.00 (CAD) for Jetpack Stats! Talk about greed!!

Dear Debbie D,

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us. We truly appreciate your long-time commitment to blogging and understand how frustrating it can be to face additional costs, especially when your blog is a creative outlet and not a significant source of income.

While we’ve made some changes to how Jetpack Stats are offered, our goal is always to provide valuable tools that help bloggers of all types succeed, whether they’re hobbyists or professionals. I’d like to point out that there are still many free features available within Jetpack that can support your blog’s growth, and we are always exploring ways to better serve our users across all budgets.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us, and we’re here to help however we can.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us, and we’re here to help however we can.

If you really wanted to help, then you would give the hobbyists a break and not charge outrageous fees to view our stats! Let the truly commercial sites pay for it. To quote @veex2:

Plenty of sites might qualify as “commercial” yet not actually make enough to justify paying for internal stats and the team openly ignores that entire group of folks.