In reply to Tim Kaye.

Hey Tim,

I think you are confusing Epoch with Replyable. Epoch is a front-end ajax-based commenting plugin we make with a number of contributors that is totally free, gpl, and has no paid versions or addons. It exists to solve some of the front-end issues with running native commenting and was developed for larger sites (such as this one) that want to run native comments but run into impossible performance issues.

Epoch isn't perfect, nor complete (as Sarah mentioned in the post, we're working on version 2), but for many sites it works better than the alternatives, such as here on Tavern where it reduced the time to submit a comment from 21 seconds down to a 250ms.

I hear you about loading posts here that have more than a hundred or so comments. Epoch uses handlebars to render the comments on the client-side, and depending on your device it can lag. We're addressing that in version 2.

The only other native-commenting solutions available for high traffic sites are Jetpack (see 21 seconds, above) and WpDiscuz which is quite nice for many sites and in most cases outperforms Epoch - but it comes with tons of features and a heavy-handed design that doesn't work for everyone.

Do you know of others solutions that retain content ownership and privacy, yet perform better than Epoch?

Replyable is the comment notification plugin we make which is freemium. That's what this article is about.

When you say the Tavern serves as a flagship for our plugins, that is true. We're proud of that. They use 4 of our commenting plugins here. All of them are free and gpl. Only one has a paid plan, and it is optional. I don't see any bait and switch there. If you do, please point it out.