Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

Greetings from Greece! I had a great time catching up with everyone at WordCamp Europe. I'm working out of Chania in Crete for the next week.

This update will be different. I haven't had time to work on Ymir because of consulting work and WordCamp. But I've been thinking a lot about the business lately.

That's because, in contrast with my incredible May, June has been a very hard month business-wise. No trials. Decent churn. Some failed payments.

I've come to accept that things need to change. As much as I want Ymir to be a product that's financially accessible to everyone like Laravel Vapor, I'd need thousands of customers for that to work. That's just not happening right now and it might never happen either.

So I've made the tough decision to change Ymir's pricing.

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

My earliest supporter and partner has been pressuring me for a few months to change my pricing. I've pushed back a lot on it, but, as they said:

I want to be happy-go-lucky-friendly-Carl. But I also want to work on Ymir full time and not take any investment. In an ideal world, I'd get everything I want, but that's not where I am. Something has to give if I want to continue working on Ymir sustainably.

What drove this home even more was reading Dagobert's Twitter thread this week.

Carl Alexander @twigpress I do a lot of work prioritizing my health, but a lot of things hit home here. Been 4 years since I started working on @YmirApp. It's draining to try stay above water and to build something on your own terms. https://twitter.com/dagorenouf/status/1668615338395865089 Dagobert Renouf @dagorenouf My wife and I decided to give up on our startup @logologydesign It was a tough decision to make, especially after spending 5 years and almost all of our savings to bootstrap it. But the reality is that despite our best efforts, we never found a way to grow beyond survival… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1668615338395865089 4:53 PM • Jun 14, 2023 0 Retweets 5 Likes

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I'm lucky that I've always made my health my top priority. That said, if you need to hear this, starting a business on your terms isn't worth sacrificing your health. But even without getting sick, a lot of what he talks about hits home for me.

I decided that out of all the things I want. The one I'd be the most ok giving up right now is my current unlimited for everyone pricing. That's because I think my best path forward is to license Ymir's technology. I can't do that if I give everything away for $39/month.

Above is what the new pricing will look like when it goes up this week.

I've restricted the $39/month plan significantly and renamed it "Personal". It only comes with three projects (2/3 of my customers have three projects or less) and a single team. Each project beyond the first three will be $13/month. I've also removed the cost allocation feature that I worked during my time in Japan.

Another important change I'm doing is restricting what you can do with the personal plan. Right now, you can do whatever you want with the unlimited plan. You could start a hosting company, host 100s of client websites as an agency, build a WordPress product business. The personal plan will limit projects to projects you have full ownership of. This means that if you're an agency or hosting company or building a WordPress-based product, you can't use the personal plan.

Ymir never had a Terms of Service page. But I've been working on one as part of the pricing change. It'll go up when I change the pricing page and it'll cover what you can do with each plan.

Finally, I've changed how support works. This is mostly to help with my sanity. I can't do debugging for every plugin in the WordPress ecosystem or spend hours figuring out why your site has performance issues. If you need help with that, you'll need to pay me or have one of the higher tier plans.

So what happens if you're on the current unlimited plan? Well, you'll get to get to keep all the features that you had up to now. I won't enforce the project restrictions to the same extent as I'll do from now on. So if you're using Ymir for projects you don't own, that's fine within reason. But I probably won't allow you to use Ymir to build a WordPress-based product or build a hosting company.

While the pricing page will go up this week, it'll take a week or two for me to implement the changes to Ymir to lockdown the features within the application. I'm also going to reach out to current and previous Ymir subscribers about the pricing change before it takes effect. This is the window to signup or reactivate your subscription to Ymir if you want to be grandfathered to the unlimited plan. It'll go away when I push out the changes to lockdown the application.

Carl