With bloat and new paywalls, not what it used to be

I first started using Jetpack way back in 2016 for a site I launched. At the time it was a brilliant Swiss Army knife of features, letting me post to social, implement useful widgets, and even email new posts to subscribers, which I did use for a time before transitioning to a formal email service.

As our site steadily grew, Jetpack’s role remained important to our day-to-day work. However, two things happened that changed our relationship with the plugin.

One, the plugin steadily took on more bloat that slowed down our site. (We keep a handful of other sites on a common shared hosting service, and Jetpack could cause them to occasionally crash if we tried to do any work on them simultaneously.) In theory this was about adding features, but a lot of those features were extraneous and / or paid features. Still not a deal-breaker for us.

But then previously free features were moved behind a paywall. Social sharing of new posts was the first, limiting us to 30 shares a month, a number we often exceed. Again, not a deal-breaker, but a concern.

Nothing, though, prepared us for Jetpack to, without any announcement, move stats behind a paywall. Moving any previously free feature behind a paywall is problematic, but stats is arguable the most important and this change feels the most egregious. While we do have Google Analytics, Jetpack had been our most user-friendly repository of stats for eight years, a veritable historical record of our beginnings, our highs and lows, and our overall trend lines. We were, just in March, able to celebrate a new best day ever, something we knew because Jetpack tracked it.

Now we can’t even view old stats without paying.

It may be all business to Automattic, a way of opening up new revenue streams and possibly covering server costs, but to us it was our story. As much as we love that story, we can’t justify the cost Automattic would charge for our traffic, and so we’ve had to move on to other alternatives for statistics and social sharing.