July 12 is approaching, and I wanted to write an article about what you and other ManageWP subscribers can expect to happen, and how to get the most out of this transition.
I’ll break the article down into three parts:
- The current status
- July 12, the Orion launch
- August 1 and beyond
The Current Status
Right now our feature set has been locked in. Multisite support will be added by the end of this week, email & event notifications in the next week. I published a detailed article about the July 12 launch, and another one that talks about the pricing update and our bundles.
The TL;DR version of the pricing update goes like this: we tried very hard to keep the ManageWP prices in the same ballpark, even though the operating cost is higher than in the Classic version. You’ve got two pricing models at your disposal that you can mix and match however you see fit:
- Per website pricing is more flexible and perfect for people managing up to 25 websites
- Bundles are for people managing 25+ websites, they come in blocks of 100 websites and have a fixed price
July 12
We picked Tuesday for the launch because you’re always super busy on Monday, and we want to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Your legacy plan will remain active
You based your business on the Classic payment model, and any abrupt changes would jeopardize your business. We know and respect that, that’s why you can remain on the legacy plan indefinitely. Once you decide that switching to the Orion pricing model might be a good idea, you can start using it for a couple of sites without having to cancel your legacy plan, and gradually switch to the new model at your pace.
Here’s what each of the three plans will get in Orion.
Standard
- Monthly Scheduled Backup, with manual backups (this is the custom version of the Scheduled Backup tool that reflect the functionality of the Standard plan in the Classic version)
Professional
- Daily Scheduled Backup, with manual backups and cloning
- Advanced Client Report
Business
- Daily Scheduled Backup, with manual backups and cloning
- Advanced Client Report
- SEO Ranking
- Uptime Monitor
- White Label
The mirror and the Classic dashboard will still be here
For now, the mirror and the Classic dashboard will be available, in case you still want to use something on the old dashboard, or maybe upgrade your legacy plan.
You can now add websites to Orion, for free
The option to add a website in Orion will go live. Websites added in Orion dashboard will be on the Orion pricing model, and will not be mirrored back into Classic (because the number of websites in Classic is limited by your plan). If you want that website on a legacy plan, you’ll have to add it in the Classic dashboard.
Orion pricing model will go live, but you won’t be charged
So far everything has been free of charge in Orion. On July 12 the pricing model will go live. Using Orion until August 1 is completely free, but if you want to turn on a premium tool, you will be asked to enter your payment card. This is because we’ve had a lot of abuse in the past, with people endlessly cycling through Trial accounts so they could clone and back up websites for free. We wanted to stop the bad practice without punishing everyone, so we did 3 things: we built a strong and usable free tier, a pay-as-you-go pricing, and we’re collecting the payment data at the moment when you start using premium tools.
New ManageWP website
The new website will focus only on the Orion features. We’re also upgrading our blog to make it easier for you to find relevant articles and guides. We’ve also recorded a bunch of videos that show you how to get the most out of each ManageWP tool.
Orion dashboard is now the default one
New users, and those currently on the Free plan, will only be able to access the Orion dashboard. If you still use the Classic dashboard, don’t worry: you’ll be given the option to switch back to Classic when you log in.
Lifetime discounts will be honored
Hey, a promise is a promise! Just bear in mind that a lot of you will also get a loyalty discount (10% for each full year as a ManageWP subscriber, up to 30%), but the loyalty discount does not stack with the lifetime discount.
Domains become websites
In Classic, the plan limit was calculated on a domain basis. So, if you had example.com and store.example.com, it was considered as a single domain. This posed a huge problem with the Orion pricing model, so we switched back to the per website model. Each WordPress installation is treated as a website. Each subsite in a multisite network is treated as a separate website. Since you can add an unlimited number of websites into Orion for free, in 99% of the cases this shouldn’t be a problem. However, if you have e.g. Professional (10) plan and 30 websites on your Classic dashboard, all 30 of them will be on the legacy plan in Orion, but you won’t be able to add more websites to the legacy plan until you remove the excess websites.
August 1 and Beyond
The Orion pricing model starts working
If you’ve turned on premium tools or bundles in July, the system will start tracking usage from August 1. Since this is a postpaid model, you will be billed on September 1.
Your legacy and Orion pricing are separate
Classic subscriptions are on BlueSnap, Orion is on Stripe. Each has its own cycle, rules and the active card. If you want to move everything to a single invoice, I recommend cancelling your legacy plan and moving everything to Orion.
Cancelling your legacy plan
When you cancel your legacy plan, you still get to use it until the next renewal. If you’d like your money back, or if you’d like to transfer the pro-rated credit to Orion, just open a support ticket and we’ll make it happen.
Disabling the mirror
You’re done with Classic, and don’t need the mirror? Since having a mirror means that any websites on a legacy plan need to be added through Classic, soon after August 1 we’ll work on a way for each user to turn off the mirror and shut down his Classic dashboard. At that point you’ll still be able to retain your legacy plan, but you’ll add and manage everything exclusively from Orion.
In Summary
In case you skimmed through the article, here’s the most important info:
- You’ll keep your legacy plan for as long as you’d like
- From July 12 to August 1 you can play around with Orion tools for free
- You can add as many websites to Orion as you’d like
- Mirror and the Classic dashboard will be around for a while
Let me know if you have any additional questions, so I could update the article and help make the transition smoother.
Thank you for helping us make Orion what it is today, and what it will be in the future!
dc
I won’t be able to switch until bulk posting is enabled in Orion. It is the main reason I found and signed up for ManageWP.
Nevena Tomovic
We will let you know as soon as that feature becomes available. Thanks for your comment.
Alex
Thanks for replying, sorry I didn’t see this until now. Yes, I publish content for my clients and it would be great to be able to show off what we published within that month for them. If it were possible I think it would be very cool to include:
– Thumbnail of the featured image used (if there isn’t a featured image then have the system put in an blog icon as a placeholder)
– The article title that’s clickable to the post on the website
– The date that it was published
– The categories that were used on the article
ealexis
We can post the same article to multiple sites with orion?
Nevena Tomovic
We don’t support bulk posting for now. We are thinking of introducing this in the future.
Karl
Always amazed at how far you’ll go in trying to provide a commercial and technical development, but still make sure that the vast majority of your customers don’t end up having to pay a higher premium – often it seems like it will end up cheaper, with many free features. Kudos on you and best of luck with the transition next week.
wordpress
“You can remain on the legacy plan indefinitely. Once you decide that switching to the Orion pricing model might be a good idea, you can start using it for a couple of sites without having to cancel your legacy plan, and gradually switch to the new model at your pace.”
In such a case, must all new sites be added to Orion?
Nevena Tomovic
Hey there,
You can add new websites to the legacy plan and increase the number of websites on your legacy plan. In other words, no you don’t have to add new websites to the Orion pricing, you can switch at your own pace.
golfandcasting
I currently have 6 websites on the Professional plan. The only reason I have the professional plan is to integrate with Google Analytics. And I really only need Google Analytics on 3 or 4 of the sites. I would like to switch to Orion, but it appears that there is no advantage for me to do that. If I understand this correctly, I would still need the professional plan for more than 5 sites and to have the analytics. Your explanation here makes it sound like everything is on per website basis, but doesn’t that really only apply to the premium features?
Nevena Tomovic
Hey,
yes it does only apply to premium features. Google Analytics integration is free in Orion, so you wouldn’t have to pay for that. All of your website can be integrated at no additional cost. The advantage in Orion is that a lot of the features are free, so you can only pay for the ones you will use on the websites that need them.
Hope that clears things up a bit. I can imagine it’s confusing, but don’t forget we are offering two weeks for free on all features from July 12, so you can check what you need and test it on your websites.
Have another look at our pricing articles (I know it’s a bit long), but it does have all of the pricing details – https://managewp.com/orion-pricing-explained and https://managewp.com/orion-pricing-update-introducing-bundles
Regards,
Nevena
ian
Can we get excluding folder back in the clone tool before launch. Migrating staging copies without wp-content/uploads is not possible in Orion.
Thanks!
Nevena Tomovic
Hey Ian,
At the moment it is not possible, but we are planning on adding it as a feature in the near future.
timjjefferson
I’m due for renewal by the 9th July. Do I just renew as normal and then convert fully to Orion (which I want to do – it’s awesome)? I won’t need the advanced reports though, so this may smooth out the pricing in my situation. I’ve no idea what the price difference is between 5 websites on ‘professional legacy’ and 5 websites on ‘daily backup – Orion’. I think it would be similar over the year.
Nevena Tomovic
Hey, glad you are enjoying Orion.
Let me work that our for you roughly. You should be paying 12$ a month atm, so that’s 144$ a year. The daily Orion backups are 2$/month so that’s 10$/month, 120$/year. On a yearly basis you are saving yourself 24$ with Orion. The great thing about our new pricing is that if you do want to add the advanced reports you can, for whatever website you like and it doesn’t need to be every month.
Your renewal date is just a few days before the Orion release. You can do two things. You can either renew it for the month of July (the professional) and wait for Orion pricing to start being implemented from August 1, and switch then. (don’t worry we will make sure you don’t pay for the overlap) Or, if you can wait a few days, the release is on July 12, and we are offering all tool for free for all websites for 2 weeks. So you can take advantage of that and start with Orion pricing on August 1. It is entirely up to you 🙂
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Nevena
d
I have canceled. Too much.
Nevena Tomovic
Sorry to hear that. Apologies for making it complicated, it is all in the interest of making it better in the long run.
benz1
Looking forward to the switch but it’s a little confusing, especially with all the information and pricing, etc, split over multiple posts. All I want to know if what I need to do after 12 July. I currently have the Classic plan and am on the Orion beta.
1. Will my current Orion account become my main account or will a new account be setup and need to manually transfer sites over?
2. Payment for July has already been made so can I cancel my classic account now and use Orion only from 1 Aug?
3. If I cancel my Classic account now will loyalty/lifetime discounts still be applied to the Orion account?
Can I suggest you publish one post will all the relevant information and instructions (keeping it as brief and succinct as possible as we are all busy and have already spent too much time reading all the posts and trying to understand them)?
Thanks.
Nemanja Aleksic
No worries, I’ll make sure all your questions are answered!
1. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, when you say you’re in the beta, do you have the same set of websites both in Classic and in Orion, or are they completely different? I’m asking because we actually have a beta program where people are able to add websites directly into Orion. On the other hand, every Trial and premium subscriber has Orion that runs in mirror mode – the same set of websites are both in Orion and in Classic. I’ll give you an answer for both scenarios, just to be safe:
a) You’re running in mirror mode: nothing changes, you’ll just be logged in automatically into Orion. All your websites will still be on your account.
b) You have a separate Orion beta account: Starting from July 12 your beta Orion account will be treated as a regular Orion account. Your Classic account will get its own Orion mirror, so essentially you’ll end up with two Orion accounts. You can choose to keep them both (although I can’t think of a reason why), or you can transfer the websites to a single account.
2. That’s correct. You can also request for your pro rated credt to be transferred to your Orion wallet, so you could use that money in Orion.
3. Yes. Your current subscription status is not relevant.
We’ll publish another short summary in the meantime, just to keep everything in one place before the launch, thanks for the suggestion!
benz1
Thanks, got it now. My Orion account is the one covered at item b above, i.e., it’s a separate account.
Good luck for the switch tomorrow! 🙂
lori
Is there a way to port the Google Analytics login/access data from Classic to Orion? That would save a lot of manual configuration time. Please?
Nemanja Aleksic
It’s not possible since Orion is a different platform. Google wouldn’t let us do this (and rightfully so), as it could be a potentially huge exploit that less ethical companies could take advantage of.
The good news is that once you connect your Google Analytics account, everything should work from the get go. Another great news is that in Orion you can connect multiple Google Analytics accounts, so you no longer need to cram all websites into a single Google Analytics account.
1lifeincome
Quite Frankly you guys Save my ass Time wise!…….I’m Glad I found You + this is Not a Plug!
Alex
On the roadmap or the list of available features, is there a request to include “new posts” that were published within a certain date selection? I would love to have the ability to include that in the client report for the 4 posts with a clickable link and a featured photo included in the report.
Thanks!
Nemanja Aleksic
There is one now, thank you for the suggestion, Alex!
Do you publish content for your clients? Do you also need any additional data apart from the ones you mentioned?
Alex
Thanks for replying, sorry I didn’t see this until now. Yes, I publish content for my clients and it would be great to be able to show off what we published within that month for them. If it were possible I think it would be very cool to include:
– Thumbnail of the featured image used (if there isn’t a featured image then have the system put in an blog icon as a placeholder)
– The article title that’s clickable to the post on the website
– The date that it was published
– The categories that were used on the article
james
+1 for this feature! That would be awesome
vee
I can’t wait, I’ve been using Orion and love it.
When will the add new website function start working?
Nemanja Aleksic
July 12!