WordPress.com upgrades have just become more interesting. WordPress.com hosts this blog, and a half dozen others I run. Even £3-a-month blogging at WordPress can now include ‘Premium Content Blocks’ — available only to Followers who pay a monthly or annual subscription. This has been newly introduced, and at last makes WordPress the obvious alternative to Patreon. The future of Patreon seems increasingly uncertain, judging by their recent behaviour and reports on their balance-sheet and staff-cuts.

It would cost me £36 (about $45) a year, to step from Free to the paid ‘Personal Plan’ at WordPress. This would give me 6Gb of storage rather than 3Gb, and… the ‘paid subscribers’ features.

That would need to be done for two of my current free sites, Tentaclii and a local-history gallery site which is nearly full of local images (and thus will need another 3Gb by the Autumn/Fall). £72 a year is not impossible.

Ads would also be removed from a £3-per-month blog, but I’m not bothered about those — since I assume 99% of visitors run an ad-blocker in their browser.

I’m not saying I’m immediately going to switch Tentaclii from Patreon, having struggled thus far to get $65 a month there. But it’s an option I’ll be keeping in mind, as the weather cools and the ‘self-employed virus hardship’ payment comes in.