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Orion Pricing: TL;DR Edition

managewp orion on a smartphone

Last week we published a very long article about the upcoming Orion pricing model. This is the condensed version that covers all the important points in a nutshell. Enjoy!

The Specs

Orion comes with a much simpler and more flexible model. It lets you easily figure out the cost per website, and scales your subscription automatically, so you can focus on your business:

  • Per-site pricing: Got 8 websites? You’ll only pay for 8 websites. not 10, not 15.
  • Multiple plans on one account: Put as many different plans as you want on a single account.
  • Custom, a la carte plans: Choose the tools you need, build your plans to best fit your needs.
  • Pay-as-you-go: You no longer need to upgrade or downgrade. When you move a website to another plan, the subscription automatically adjusts.
  • Unlimited free websites: You can now keep hundreds of free websites on the same ManageWP dashboard as your premium websites.

The Game Plan

In roughly 8 weeks, the Classic dashboard will be phased out, and all ManageWP users will be moved to the Orion dashboard. Here’s what you need to know:

  • Right now all ManageWP users (except those on the Free plan) can access their mirrored Orion account. It’s the inconspicuous tab icon at the top right, in case you ever wondered. Try it, get to know Orion. The layout is a bit different, so it might take a bit to get used to it.
  • Roughly 8 weeks from now we will take the Classic dashboard offline, and move everyone to Orion. At this point the Orion pricing model will go live.
  • All active ManageWP subscribers will be grandfathered. Your legacy plan and all your websites will be waiting for you. The Classic backup will be replaced by the Orion backup, at no extra cost.
  • Here’s what each legacy plan will get:
  • You will not be able to change the number of websites on your legacy plan; if you plan on expanding your business, upgrade before Classic gets phased out.
  • We’re switching from a per-domain to a per-site model. If you have multiple websites on a single domain (e.g. you are on Business (10 domains) but have 17 websites), the excess websites will not be removed. As long as they are on your dashboard, they will be managed as usual. If you remove them from the legacy plan, you won’t be able to add it back if you’re over the plan limit.
  • You can keep your legacy plan and experiment with the Orion plans at the same time. Your legacy plan will basically be treated as just another plan on your ManageWP dashboard. Your lifetime discounts will be honored in Orion.
  • If you choose to cancel your legacy subscription, you will be pro rated upon request.

Tools and Custom Plans

Creating and adding websites to custom plans is a breeze:

  • Create a plan by picking the tools you need, and naming the plan.
  • Drag and drop your websites to that plan.

The tools have a straightforward, per-site pricing. Uptime Monitor is $1/month. Daily Backup is $2/month. This means that each website on the Uptime Monitor + Daily Backup plan is $3/month. This makes it very easy for you to compare your cost to the fee you’re charging your client.

There are several discounts that offset the cost if you pick multiple tools for a plan, if you have 15+ websites, and a few more. All existing ManageWP lifetime discounts will be honored.

Check out the Orion pricing page below to figure out your perfect set of plans:

Got questions? Leave us a comment below, or check out the full Orion pricing article here

Nemanja Aleksic Avatar

79 responses

  1. WP Site Defenders Avatar
    WP Site Defenders

    I have 75 websites on the professional plan, and I’m currently paying 96.00/mo.
    The same number of websites, with daily backup, and uptime monitor, nothing else, is now 191.25?
    Is that right? almost 100.00 more a month?
    Per website price has gone from $1.28 to $3.00?

  2. octaviomoura@gmail.com Avatar
    octaviomoura@gmail.com

    I have a Standard Plan with 5 websites. With this “new plan prices” can I have this 5 websites with the manual Orion backup + all free tools, and add more (2, 3, …) websites only with the free tools without additional cost?

    Thanks,
    OM

  3. Meg Geddes Avatar
    Meg Geddes

    This is definitely a case of “don’t make me think” I don’t want to have to figure out price per site; I have too many sites for that. When I buy tools, I always buy the full or “dev” version just so I don’t have to think about how many licenses or how many tools or how much space. I just want the full package, always there when I need it, for however many sites I need it. I don’t think I’m your target demographic any longer.

  4. info@zephyrstudio.com Avatar
    info@zephyrstudio.com

    So if we have the professional plan with weekly backups only, it is $1/mo per site correct? Would all additionally added sites after the switch be this same cost, or would we need to add sites now before the switch as open slots to lock in that price. For example I have 10 sites now, but want to lock in this $1/mo for 20 more sites after the switch. Do I need to bump up my current plan to 30 sites before the final switch? Thanks

  5. Win Avatar
    Win

    I have a Standard plan for 35 websites (of which I’m currently using 32), for which I paid around $160 last year. My subscription is up on April 24.

    Your new pricing model makes no mention of Standard legacy plans, only Professional and Business. I do not use your backup, or uptime monitoring ; I just use the dashboard to be able to access all my sites conveniently from one place.

    Does this mean I there is a free version I would use, going forward?

  6. Curtis Avatar
    Curtis

    I honestly see no issues with the new pricing…the fact you are housing the backups yourself is an added cost to your own bill which obviously isn’t free…the way i see it is that with a fully loaded plan on one site (daily backups and not the new realtime backups) is probably being charged to some clients at 80 per month or more with a small $4.50 cost to myself…cant expect improvements to be made across the board with no price changes :p…kudos with a very nice product guys…glad you guys decided to upgrade 😀

  7. silverrockets Avatar
    silverrockets

    I can’t figure out the cost for my plan using your calculator — I have the Standard plan for 50 websites, and I’d like to bump that up to 65- 70. The only tool I want to use is Weekly backups, possibly uptime monitoring on a few. Is it worth it for me to upgrade to Professional (75) or should I wait? What would my cost be?

    Sorry, I find this new pricing utterly confusing…

  8. webmaster@karks.com Avatar
    webmaster@karks.com

    At what point will we be able to start creating our own custom plans – is that once the Classic dashboard goes away?

  9. Donna McMaster Avatar
    Donna McMaster

    I have 48 sites on the Pro plan right now. A few are never updated, so I don’t really need backups. For another handful, weekly backups are sufficient. For 32 of them, I have a maintenance agreement that includes daily backups. I just calculated my costs, and I will actually save some money with the new pricing.

    I really appreciate all the work you folks have done, just to give me better features and charge me less. 🙂 Seriously, I don’t know what I would do without ManageWP. Thanks so much!

  10. InStudio Avatar
    InStudio

    Hello There

    Will you allow Pay Pal payment?

    Thanks

  11. sam Avatar
    sam

    Is it possible, right now, for me to add any free sites to my plan… or will I have to wait 8 weeks for that??

  12. damir@niceworkdone.com Avatar
    damir@niceworkdone.com

    So much fuss over this pricing and most of the customers will benefit from this. It’s in human nature to be afraid of any changes but after some time you ge used to it. Keep up the good work guys!

  13. georgek Avatar
    georgek

    Hi there,I’m trying to figure out whether to upgrade now or wait until the orion phase in . i do have a 30% lifetime discount available, all i need at this stage is 7 domains with an option to scale up at a later time. I would like weekly updates (with option to go daily as things grow)… this is under the professional plan…right now this comes to $1.37 per domain under an annual plan, with the calculator is looks like $2 per month, is this correct?
    i would be interested in scaling back to the standard plan , however not sure how the manual back up works, if there is an instruction on how to do this that would be greatly appreciated. thanks

  14. pjones@jfd.co.uk Avatar
    pjones@jfd.co.uk

    We currently have a Business plan with 14 sites. We clone these sites down to staging environments to test updates before we push them live. With the new payment plan will be be paying for both our live and staging sites?

  15. ksarginson@tampabay.rr.com Avatar
    ksarginson@tampabay.rr.com

    I would like to have the newsletter if it is FREE. Thanks.

  16. daniel@push10.com Avatar
    daniel@push10.com

    I have been concerned about the pricing plan since you announced Orion, but it looks like you nailed it. I like the prices, and the way you put it together. Thanks for all your hard work.

  17. Glenn Hauman Avatar
    Glenn Hauman

    Will you be migrating Manage Themes and Plugins over to Orion anytime soon?

  18. kenny@phnx21designs.com Avatar
    kenny@phnx21designs.com

    This presents a far better opportunity for myself and the other users. I’ve only been a user for 2 months and have been experimenting with pricing plans for my clients in some small samples for feedback. The one thing that seems to pop up is people asking for certain features from the “more robust” plan at some sort of hybrid cost/custom plan.

    With the ability to customize my plans now, I have so many more options when it comes to designing plans for clients. I’m considering mirroring your setup with a base package and letting people customize the plans themselves. Give the people what they want, right?!

    By the way, I love “Awesometastic” as a word and look forward to slipping into conversations later today. Keep up the great work!

  19. info@cybersprout.net Avatar
    info@cybersprout.net

    This will work out great for us and I never liked the constant upgrading. Simplicity is awesome!

  20. ViraDesign Avatar
    ViraDesign

    Hello,

    I see benefits to this change. First off, having all sites in one account will be awesometastic! 😉 Switching back and forth breaks the workflow. I have 5 sites on the business plan and not using the features to extra features to the fullest. It’s great to know that new plan supports changing needs.

    I’ve got about 20 sites total on the standard plan with some dev sites. It’s good to know the test sites will be free.

    I’m still not clear on the details for annual payment. I signed up in January and my guess is I will request a prorate and have all my sites in one place and pick and choose what sites need the more robust features. Is that correct?

    Is cloning a feature for the free account? Most cases after the dev phase is complete, I’ll clone it to a live domain and it remains on my server and then added to MWP.

    Thank you for making our WP workflow so much easier. I’m still discovering new features.

    P.S. I’ve been looking for the cloning tool in Orion. Is it available yet?

  21. Sandra Avatar
    Sandra

    I’m thinking of getting Desktop Server for local hosting – for ease of use and easy transfer between live and local. Is the Orion Clone compatible with Desktop Server do you know? I’m trying to get an easy “push button” solution for my iMac so want to get as uncomplicated as possible.

  22. Theresa Jennings Avatar
    Theresa Jennings

    So, backing up to our S3 account ALSO is no longer an option? I’d pay for that option. I’ll need to buy a separate non-ManageWP plugin for that? I’m a fan of redundancy for backups. I do the same with my own computer. Two different backups locally (including a bootable backup) to external drives, and a backup to BackBlaze. Because stuff happens.

  23. lauren@laurenhaas.com Avatar
    lauren@laurenhaas.com

    I’ll be honest, I’ve barely had time to skim the information and I don’t completely understand what’s happening, except that my dashboard and pricing will change somehow. I’m trying not to resent these changes coming up at a time when my workload is nearly killing me. I don’t have time to learn a new system or try to calculate what my new pricing will be.

    I’m assuming no major changes will happen without my approval and that I’ll be getting an e-mail telling me what my new price will be before I incur any charges at a rate I didn’t sign on for. I’ll decide then whether to continue my service. If I like the new price, I’ll test-drive the new dashboard. If not, I’m not spending any time on that.

  24. wolfsuperstore@gmail.com Avatar
    wolfsuperstore@gmail.com

    I am primarily concerned about pricing. If I understand it right, my price is going to go up significantly. I want ALL of the features that I have now. But paying per feature will make me pay around $13/site. I only pay $2 and some change right now. Talk about a huge increase! My business cannot afofr that. Please tell me I am understanfding this wrong! If I am reading it right, I have no choice, I have to go back to CMS Commander.
    On the other hand, I just used your calculator, and it says that 10 sites will run me $45, so about 4.50 per site. That is still double my current price, but not as bad. Please help me understand this pricing structure better!

  25. nwesource Avatar
    nwesource

    For as many people using Manage WP as a staging site tool – because it is the best on the market for that – I think you guys may want to consider including a staging site for each website. I’m not sure how you would implement that – BUT it would then set you even further apart as the management tool that provides staging as a major feature.

  26. Peter Butler Avatar
    Peter Butler

    Little confused, help me out here, we’ve been with you from the beginning.

    We currently have the Business Level package at 500 sites level, although we upgraded recently we dropped down to only 239 sites managed.

    How will this affect me?

  27. Jurgen Avatar
    Jurgen

    Hi,

    Very nice and very clear price model. There is only one thing I don’t see in this blog. With a free plan, are you able to perform a manual backup?

  28. fillip Avatar
    fillip

    Isn’t there a calculator for this? There’s no link here in your blog post

  29. colin@mennescreative.com Avatar
    colin@mennescreative.com

    Hi,

    I have a professional subscription (25 sites) now, if i use the calculator to calculate the costs of the new orion pricing i almost pay the same (i think). Now i am really doubting if i have to switch before the change to Orion or after that, it is not really clear to me what the best choice for me is. Can you help me with that?

  30. redcap@eerdekens.com Avatar
    redcap@eerdekens.com

    I’m currently on the free plan ( 5 websites).
    What will happen to my dashboard once the old version gets phased out ? As a free-plan user I can’t loggin (any more) on the Orion Dashboard.
    Do I have to subscribe to a payed plan ? What would be the most interesting plan ( I don’t need any of the payed features, but I might in the future for some websites, not all)/

  31. ronald@tribevibe.nl Avatar
    ronald@tribevibe.nl

    Hi, I cannot find the auto update function(Of wordpress, plug in and templates) in Orion. Can you point me in the right direction?

    Thanks!

  32. marketingtechy@gmail.com Avatar
    marketingtechy@gmail.com

    Hi, any news on when the new pricing will go live?

  33. ran@foothold-systems.co.il Avatar
    ran@foothold-systems.co.il

    Any news? The blog post says “In roughly 8 weeks, the Classic dashboard will be phased out, and all ManageWP users will be moved to the Orion dashboard.”, and that was ~13 weeks ago…

  34. mrnarga@gmail.com Avatar
    mrnarga@gmail.com

    I’m still confusing with this. At this time, I owned Professional account with 10 domains. What’s happened with my account if I switch to Orion? Do I need pay more or somethings else?

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