How We Can Be “Off The Market” and Thriving At The Same Time

There’s been a fair amount of confusion about our Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion and what these changes mean for GridPane and all of its customers and users going forward.

I even got a handful of people texting me directly asking “Is GridPane shutting down?!?!”

And this is 100% our fault. The messaging of the BFCM email that we sent out yesterday was fairly sensationalist and, in retrospect, hair-brained. That is entirely on me, and I apologize for any needless panic or confusion.

GridPane has never been doing any better than we are right now, and that will be true tomorrow and the next day and every foreseeable day into the future. We’re growing organically, and we become more and more profitable with each new client and each new (most WooCommerce) website that we add to our platform.

The decision to pull the existing plans off the market is NOT because they aren’t sustainable or that we plan to shutter them or stop supporting them, it’s because they simply don’t capture anything close to the value that we deliver in exchange for them.

Quite simply: they are too good of a deal.

I’m sure my detractors and fans of other hosting control panels will heartily disagree with that statement, but the reality is that we were never the right thing for them, and we never will be.

GridPane has always lived in a weird place somewhere in between “hosting control panel” land and traditional “managed WordPress.”

What most people do not realize is that we currently make significantly more profit from the latter, and it’s considerably harder to support the former.

So this “pivot” is our move to try to reconcile with that base reality.

It turns out that there are not a lot of people who want a “definitive arsenal of tools for Serious WordPress Professionals.” But there are a LOT of people that just want managed WordPress… without all the strings and bullshit and deceptive practices.

People want transparency and the option to do whatever they want but they also want to effectively never lift a finger. And this is the segment that we serve, more and more with each passing day.

We don’t take customers from other hosting control panel companies. We take customers exclusively from traditional managed WordPress providers. This is where we will be pouring our focus in 2025 and beyond.

So when we say we’re pulling these existing plans off the market, we do NOT mean that they will be withering on the vine or that in any way, shape, or form, that the development and improvement of them will stop. Or even slow down.

All existing customers and plans will continue to be refined and improved just as they have been for the last 7 years.

The difference will be that no one will be able to purchase these features at these current prices.

Everyone will have the option to purchase add-ons, across ALL account types. Even completely free Core users will have the option to upgrade every aspect of their account and service with GridPane. But these paid add-ons, if you stacked them all up, will cost more in total than each of the existing tiers, with their current bundle of features.

So, specifically: if you had a Core plan, for example, and you wanted to add all of the various features and support that you would get from Developer Plus, and have unlimited sites, your monthly bill with all your add-ons will exceed the current retail monthly price of $500.

But you might not need all of those features. You might only need one Custom server, for example. And so your customized plan with your desired upgrades might only cost you $25 plus the cost of your hardware, which you could secure from any provider you choose.

All of which is to say: nothing is being taken away, nothing is being turned off, no existing customers are going to be negatively impacted. The current deals that we have for BFCM are the best deals that we have available, and right now is the literal best time for anyone new looking to sign up or for any existing customers looking to upgrade and/or lock in the best possible deal.

We’re not stopping anything. It’s full steam ahead. We’re just going to change the way in which NEW customers can start an engagement with us. They won’t have the option to just immediately turn on all of the capabilities of Developer Plus, for unlimited sites, with insanely great support, for one flat fee of $500/month.

They will be able to get all of that capability but at a significant premium.

Right now we have people who host literally hundreds of sites that pay us less than $1 per site per month. That’s insane, especially when you consider that the going rate for one website in traditional “managed WordPress” can easily be hundreds dollars per month, going down to as low as $8 to $12 per site, but only at scale (100+ sites on an account).

With our control panel offerings we are providing considerably MORE than any traditional managed WordPress provider and taking in an order of magnitude less money. Simply put, new customers for the GridPane Panel are not going to get that good a deal going forward – plain and simple.

But all of our existing customers, every single one of them, will continue to benefit from everything we’ve built up to this point, and they’ll continue to enjoy the fruits of their partnership with us. This week they’ll get their first live glance of our entirely new UI, pictured below, and they’ll start to get a fuller picture of what is coming in the months ahead.