Jeff, the concerns raised about ManageWP's pricing were not the usual case of whiners complaining about not getting everything for free; the point that I and others have made is that, by targeting the high-end, they misread the market and missed out on a massively bigger opportunity.

Just to be clear, the ManageWP service itself is superb, absolutely superb, and getting better all the time. I participated in the beta and Vladimir very kindly lifted the usual limit to allow me to manage a very high number of sites, so, I can tell you from personal experience that, if you manage dozens or even hundreds of sites, ManageWP is an amazing experience.

In fact, I would be one of their 2000 paying customers today, for at least some of my sites, but I was unable to get their payment system to accept any of my credit cards before the early-bird deadline - they were using Plimus and it is the only payment system that has ever refused to take money from me, bloody frustrating!

Even if I was a paying customer, however, I would still say that their decision to change their pricing strategy represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in the WordPress world.

Jeff, I don't know if you still run guest articles but I would love to expand properly upon this subject at some point, because I think this whole story carries some important lessons.