I think some page-builders will remain competitive — especially if they are sold as part of a package and in a hosted space. WordPress.com could certainly choose to use Gutenberg to build a true Squarespace compete — but that doesn’t necessarily mean WordPress.com would “win” against a page builder based on WordPress, that already has market share/brand awareness. The interesting thing here is that the success of a hosted Elementor or similar page-builder platform isn’t necessarily tied to its connection to WordPress. If there is an ecosystem to support that page builder and the front-end is customized in a way that de-emphasizes WordPress, the people that pay for the service (whether they are consultants selling to clients or people who want to build a site from scratch), aren’t going to care that much about the WordPress association or branding. It’s similar with e-commerce sites. Companies that I talk to care less about the backend, whether it is Shopify or WooCommerce or Squarespace or whatever, rather than the overall experience of getting setup and the ongoing costs for running the store.

That said, I don’t think every page builder will have the opportunity to compete — especially once the first-party support gets better.

To me, the opportunity is almost completely in the SaaS space. If I made a page builder today, I would be looking at either an exit strategy (or a migration to Gutenberg if possible) or a pivot to a SaaS model immediately because keeping up with the changes/developments of Gutenberg when selling a plugin for self-hosted solutions is going to become increasingly difficult from both a development and a support standpoint.

That said, some of these page builders are still much more advanced than what Gutenberg can do now and what its roadmap is for the future. The problem is, that advantage isn’t going to last forever without continued innovation/investment and without an ecosystem or add-one/extensions — and even then, you’re going up against a 500lb gorilla, even if that gorilla is slow-moving.

For page builders who don’t have a thriving userbase and ecosystem (especially ecosystem), looking at how a business model can be built off of Gutenberg’s block model (whether it’s via a SaaS approach for the blocks or for the whole package) will be essential — because I don’t think the model of selling a page builder plugin or theme will be viable longterm.