1. WordPress.com - Hosted SaaS for building websites. Very cheap to run, includes ads on free sites, and they sell users upgrades like custom domains or removing ads from their sites.
2. Jetpack - Services for self-hosted WordPress sites, like backups, social media integration, image CDN, antispam - mostly paid services, again very cheap to run.
3. WooCommerce - Open source ecommerce service. They sell add-ons like payment gateways, and have their own with a percentage fee of each transaction.
4. WPVIP - Enterprise and high-scale hosting service. Expensive ($25k/yr+) but worth it for large companies who run their business off it, like newsrooms and marketing sites.
To my knowledge, they're each independently profitable. Automattic also has a lot of additional smaller services which support these, and various Other Bets.
(I don't work at Automattic, but have many friends there.)
I am on an old Premium plan for the Day One journaling app. It was recently acquired by Automattic. Happy to keep paying, but concerned that Apple recently Sherlocked it.
The Apple Journal app is really really limited, and probably good enough for anyone who isn’t a serious journaler.
The only “innovative” feature the Apple Journal app has is access to private data that other apps don’t, to be able to come up with ML-based journalling recommendations. However, this feature is also exposed via an API, for other journalling apps to implement too.
So… if you’re not actually a journaler, the Apple Journal app is probably good enough for you.
If you actually journal, you’ll probably use Day One, because the set of compromises it makes best aligns with the majority of active journalers.
It upset me when they turned off iCloud sync in favour of their proprietary server sync, because they’re effectively asking me to trust them with my data. They finally implemented E2EE though, and it looks like it’s been implemented properly, so it’s less bothersome again.
It’s just a shame that Diarium refuses to implement high resolution images, or they’d actually be a viable competitor with the ability to self-host your E2EE DB sync.
1. WordPress.com - Hosted SaaS for building websites. Very cheap to run, includes ads on free sites, and they sell users upgrades like custom domains or removing ads from their sites.
2. Jetpack - Services for self-hosted WordPress sites, like backups, social media integration, image CDN, antispam - mostly paid services, again very cheap to run.
3. WooCommerce - Open source ecommerce service. They sell add-ons like payment gateways, and have their own with a percentage fee of each transaction.
4. WPVIP - Enterprise and high-scale hosting service. Expensive ($25k/yr+) but worth it for large companies who run their business off it, like newsrooms and marketing sites.
To my knowledge, they're each independently profitable. Automattic also has a lot of additional smaller services which support these, and various Other Bets.
(I don't work at Automattic, but have many friends there.)