2025-08-14 10:52:33
WordPress.com offers two modes of WP: WordPress and WordPress MS. For free and lower-priced accounts it runs a version of WordPress called WordPress MS, or WordPress Multisite, which is designed for super-efficient multi-tenant usage, which is what has allowed it to introduce hundreds of millions of people to WordPress and run at a huge scale. (It was initially called MU, for multi-user, but we had to change it because someone squatted the name WPMU and built a business on top that was confusing users with commercial products. Such is my curse.) It revolutionized the hosting industry in a number of ways, including acclimating customers to per-site pricing instead of unlimited domains and raising the bar for what a host would manage for users so they didn’t have to worry. It has also provided a highly secure base login, which allows us to offer popular SaaS services, such as statistics and anti-spam, to all WordPress users, regardless of where they’re hosted.
At higher-priced plans you’d get access to not just a curated set of plugins and themes but the ability to install anything you like from the ecosystem, which invisibly switches your account to WP.cloud in the backend that supports unlimited plugins and themes and custom code, in a way that’s still multi-datacenter and maintenance-free. This has been very successful and works great for a ton of customers, but it still puts an asterisk when you recommend WordPress.com to someone because they’d need to be on one of the higher-priced plans to get an experience of WordPress with custom plugins and themes.
For the first time ever we’re running a summer special where every single paid account gets that full WP.cloud experience with full customization and control. It’s a test we’re running until August 25th. It’s WordPress, without the asterisk, without limits, implemented in a way that’s intuitive and safe for novice users, while also being extremely powerful for developers. If you haven’t checked out WP.com in a while, it’s a great deal starting at just $4 per month. I’m curious to see the results of how this goes. We also have a number of more radical things I’m eager to try out! It’s a great time to reimagine what you’re doing from the ground up and question your longest-held beliefs, as AI has really put people in a more experimental and open mindset.
2025-08-13 09:52:24
One of the projects that has been going very well within Automattic is Newspack, a vertical WordPress distribution tailored for publishers. Here’s the story of the Haitian Times:
2025-07-31 10:20:37
To announce and celebrate the incredible engineering achievement of the Beeper team launching local bridges and their premium model we hosted a fun event in Automattic’s space in NYC. The app side of Automattic does some amazing work, and the applications themselves are pretty well known and reviewed, but many don’t know they’re part of Automattic, so it was a good opportunity to tell that side of our story a bit. Here’s the video from the event:
And if you’ve ever wanted to get better control over your instant messages, regardless of what network they may be on, definitely check out Beeper. I find it especially useful on desktop, like a Superhuman for messaging.
2025-07-01 04:34:50
In honor of Automattic’s 20th anniversary, and also since it’s been a few years, I joined Nilay Patel the editor-in-chief of The Verge on their Decoder Podcast. We talked about Tumblr and the Fediverse, how Automattic thinks about Ecosystem and Cosmos sides of the business, Automattic’s re-organization into cross-business functional teams and leadership, the vision of Clay as a personal CRM and Beeper as the super-human messaging app that puts control in the hands of users, Newspack, the future of websites, the obligatory coverage of the alleged WP Engine trademark violations and their subsequent preemptive suit, and much more. Please give it a listen! They chose the title “Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress.”
Speaking of Beeper, we’re going to do a fun event for the next-gen version that’s launching on July 16 in New York City in NoHo. I’ll be there along with Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria and some of the best and brightest in New York’s tech and creative class. If you’re a Beeper early adopter (or would like to be) and want to attend, leave a comment! We’ve held back some invites for cool folks like readers of ma.tt. 
It’s like getting on board with WordPress in 2004.
2025-06-26 23:01:50
Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten fame, ran an Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 in February. The prompt: “Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.” The submissions were collected anonymously in a giant 450-page Google Doc. I don’t think the winners have been chosen yet, but there is one essay that has been making the rounds and getting shared more, and that’s Alpha School and “2-hour Learning” powered by AI, a parent’s perspective on Alpha School, a set of “AI-powered” schools in Texas and Florida.
It’s worth reading the entire essay, but I wanted to excerpt a few points I found interesting:
After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:
- It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
- It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
- It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
- The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program).
One of the surprises doesn’t come until Part 4 of the essay:
Incentives
People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.
I hope that gives you enough of a hook to read the entire essay, it was quite good and provocative to many assumptions I’ve had about education.
2025-06-21 10:59:54
We’re celebrating a fun anniversary at Automattic today, our 20th, with a fun look-back. Gosh, it’s been quite a journey, and it still feels like we’re just getting started in so many areas.
In 2005, being a remote-first company was anathema to investors and business leaders* at the time; it was a scarlet letter that combined with our embrace of Open Source and the relative inexperience got us some funny looks and a lot of skepticism. I will be forever grateful to the true contrarians who bet on Automattic in our earliest days.
Even when it was clearly working the first few years, there was always the dismissal of “that won’t scale” that loomed like a remote startup Great Filter. These days I hear from friends who run incubators or do seed investing that almost every company they look at taps into remote talent.
It makes me think about what uncommon things Automattic does today that will be standard in the coming decades. We do our best to balance idealism with pragmatism, because even if you are on the right side of history, being too early can be as bad as being wrong.
I can’t predict everything that will change over the coming decades, especially with AI making the next few years particularly hard to predict. Still, I do know a few things that won’t change: everything flows from our people, open source is still the most powerful idea of our generation, growth is the best feedback loop, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. People will always want fast, bug-free software; instant, omniscient customer service when they need it; and experiences so intuitive that they usually don’t. And once they’ve had a taste of freedom, it’s hard to return to their previous state. (For more, see our creed.)
Our industry is highly cyclical, and I feel fortunate to have gained the perspective of a few bubbles and crashes, along with all the emotions that go with them. It’s undeniable we’re in the very early days — the command-line times — of an AI era, and though it will probably have its own bubble and crash cycles, it feels as significant to me as anything since we started. It’s more important than ever that we fight for open source and the freedom-enhancing side of technology. I’m committed to doing whatever I can to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging, but there are many other areas of the human experience to cover… pick one to work on! It’s hard and rewarding work.
When I was working on an early version of one of our internal stats systems, it was really important to me that it showed rolling windows of the last 24 hours (daily), 168 hours, 4 weeks, and of course yearly. The rolling was important so you could see the impact of your changes as soon as possible. Then I felt called to add another: decade.
Some thought it was silly at the time, and it’s true that it initially served mainly as a way to display the cumulative number. But I wanted every time someone looked at one of these stats pages that they were reminded that we’re building for the long term. Our users and customers deserve nothing less. And now we have some statistics with 20 years of history, it has some useful comparisons as well!
In Ten Years of Automattic, I wrote:
There’s a lot more to do, and I can’t wait to see what a “20 Years of Automattic” post says. I’m a lucky guy.
Now we know! I’m still a very lucky guy, and can’t wait to build, learn, and share alongside a talented crew of like-minded hackers, dreamers, and doers.
* I’ll note that pioneers like Bob Young (Red Hat), Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research), Jason Fried (37Signals), and Mårten Mickos (MySQL) were big inspirations. Also, the entire Open Source community and most projects operated at least partially this way, which is why it seemed so natural to us as a second-generation Open Source company.
