@ Paxton

i really like social rocket. The free version has tons of options and should take care of most people.

As for this change, seems dumb to me. and to try to mil, people for a buck right now or 10 bucks at full price? Someone is not a marketing genius there.

Besides, is the bloat of anything Jetpack worth the hassle? Kitchen sink plugins are stupid because of how they slow servers.

It seems to me that Automattic is looking for anyway to drag a dollar out of the community. They are directly competing with contributors.

Ive been using WP since the beginning and sometimes I want to look elsewhere. If Automattic continues to cannibalize the community, I expect viable alternatives will come sooner rather than later.

Look at Elementor and the other page builders plus some of the hosting providers and you can see they are positioning themselves to fork WP and proceed as a unified product not part of the general WP community.