I was reading this article WordPress Manifesto - 15 Years In, Here’s What’s Actually Broken and felt like it was worth sharing, Many of us here use WordPress, though I know there has always been a lot of pushback in this space.
This section stood out to me, although really he makes a number of potent points:
Free isn’t free
Core WordPress is bare-minimum. To get a real, usable site you need a stack of plugins. Running a store? You need WooCommerce, a pile of Woo add-ons (because Woo doesn’t ship with invoicing or most payment gateways), an SMTP plugin, a security plugin, 2FA, SEO, and something like ACF or Pods for custom content types.
Most of those plugins have a “free” tier that’s a gateway drug. You hit a wall, then pay. Forty bucks here, sixty there. Individually cheap, but it compounds. And it’s almost always a yearly subscription. So before your site earns a single euro, you’re already locked into hosting, domain, and a stack of renewals.
“Just cancel the subscriptions” isn’t a real answer. The moment a plugin stops updating and a vulnerability drops, your site is a sitting duck. Pay or get hacked. Those are the options.
Most site owners also end up paying for maintenance - because knowing how to configure all these plugins and fix the gaps between them is its own full-time skill. So “free CMS” quietly becomes hosting + domain + 6–10 subscriptions + a retainer. Let’s stop pretending it’s free.
And the market knows it. Core is free. Hosting is cheap because WordPress runs on ancient PHP and weak shared boxes. Themes are free. Plugins are free. So everyone expects everything around WordPress to cost nothing too - designing, implementing, cleaning up hacked installs, performance, SEO. All of it. Treated like it should cost nothing. That’s a bad deal for everyone doing the actual work.