Hi @wolfganghammersmith,
I can assure you EWWW IO hasn’t been sold, and we have been providing premium services within EWWW IO since the fall of 2013 that make it possible for me to work on the plugin full time (since 2017). With over a million users, 99% of which use the plugin for free, I’ve also hired Adam to help with customer support, and so it takes a good deal of money to keep this ship sailing 🙂
In addition to the “original” free functionality, a lot has been added over the years. Notably, a few years ago, we added free lossless compression for JPG images via the API for folks on “exec-deprived servers”. Even better, that’s available for unlimited sites and unlimited images at zero cost, so our API compresses millions of images for free every single day. This is only possible because some folks choose to pay for premium features, and I’m greatly appreciative of that fact.
I’m sorry if you feel like we are “nagging” or trying to trick folks into paying for the API or CDN vs. using the local features. That is certainly not our intent, as all notices are dismissible, and include links to the docs regarding exec() or how to install/compile the local binaries.
I try to balance our marketing efforts so that they aren’t too aggressive, but I won’t apologize for making money for what we do either. We strive to offer the best support and help folks make their website faster, and we get constant confirmation that we’re accomplishing those goals. You can support us, or find somewhere you like better, that’s up to you!
It is perfectly fine and understandable to expand your functionality but the nagging prompts in our sites have been misleading the admin users/site owners to think your plugin has lost functionality locally.
We have no choice but to seek alternatives since we do not work with “exec-deprived servers” that lack local functionality. In fact, I rarely encounter these servers in my travels at all.
I am sure that if you saw the questions we are getting you would understand why we have to abandon Ewww at this point.
I would actually love to see those questions (you can email them via https://ewww.io/contact-us/), but would also point out that we just released an “agency mode” last week which should remove just about anything like that (unless we missed something). Define EWWWIO_WHITELABEL anywhere or use the ‘ewwwio_whitelabel’ filter to enable it.
