About Us
Automattic in St. Ferreol Les Neiges, Quebec
WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who work on the open source blogging software available at WordPress.org.
Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category. However, as easy-to-use as we could make the open source package, there was still a barrier in that it requires a hosting account, a database, FTP, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms that make normal people like you and me dizzy.
We wanted to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience. So we created WordPress.com, a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. We’re a bit of an underdog, as there are much larger hosted blogging services such as Blogger or TypePad that have been out for years, but when WordPress.org got started people said the blog software market was saturated and there wasn’t room for anything new. (The big players then were Greymatter and Movable Type.) We think we have something unique to bring to the table.
WordPress.com is under very active development, and we roll out updates almost every day. New features and services are driven by you so please use our feedback form to let us know what you want.
Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and things that are currently free will remain free in the future, but we do offer paid a la carte upgrades for things like CSS editing and custom domains. How do we pay for everything? WordPress.com is run by Automattic which currently makes money from the aforementioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting partnerships.
We know there are a lot of places you could put your blog, and we’d be extra honored if you consider us. If you’re a current user and you dig what we’re doing, the best way you can help us out is to help a friend get set up as well. It also gives you more buddies for your blogroll.