Has WPMU allowed a top plugin to deteriorate to promote a paid alternative?

Unfortunately it’s totally beyond our control that Yahoo might be shutting down their smush.it service with no warning. To do right by the users of this free plugin we needed to push an update right away that informs them of what is going on.

As stated in the message we are researching the possibilities for a new free api if smush.it doesn’t come back online that could help the free version of this plugin go on. It’s not easy as smushing images is very heavy on server resources, so expensive to run. Thats why all the alternatives are just front ends to paid services.

Smush it team have to put a standalone version of this plugin
i will pay it, but don’t charge me 20-30$ at month
just one time payment for this plugin. Please think about this.
We are in the internet ERA why we are not be able to get in touch with someone at yahoo?

we like to pay for A STANDALONE version of wp smush it PRO but don’t charge us MONTHLY for one plugin 5-6-7 dollars at month. Make the price, 20 or 30$ and that’s it

Nothing will ever convince me to get roped into a monthly fee for a wordpress plugin. It might take longer to compress my images before I upload them, but I’m never going to sign up for the wpmu dev paid account for access to this plugin.

in the last for my opinion WPMU DEV team have to do something to help us.

Even if they can’t fix the plugin, re-using the brand for their own code and advertising their subscription-based plugin on top of the corpse of a well-known wordpress plugin is pretty reprehensible behaviour.

The price is secondary, $5-$10 is reasonable to ask for a monthly fee for such a service, but asking $50 (only $25 a month if paid annually) is batshit crazy.

Hey all,

As you’re aware, Yahoo provide the Smush.it service, if they stop the service there is little we can do to convince them otherwise.

https://smush.it
https://smushit.eperf.vip.ac4.yahoo.com/

Our plugin simply allows you to connect to their API with a nice interface.

Yahoo seem to be silent about this, but people are tweeting:

https://twitter.com/SEOnational/status/579274827149811712
https://twitter.com/how_to_seo_2015/status/579059354411905025
https://twitter.com/jerem_petersen/status/578708248095768577
https://twitter.com/lubomski/status/577825551106371584

We’re doing something to help, until we can find a comparable free service we’ve included a notice to let you know what’s happening, and there is our Pro version which uses our own servers.

We’re also looking at the possibility of running our own free service, but servers are not cheap and processing images like this can be resource intensive. We also need to get the hardware setup and some special custom development.

Rest assured we’re working as quickly as we can can to resume a free service. We’ll update as soon as we can.

Good news! We’ve worked like maniacs the last week and built our own free API that is faster, more reliable, and more powerful, and just released the rewrite of the plugin to use it.

Upgrade now and let us know how it works for you! (if you like it, consider giving us a nice rating!)