Free Isn't a Business Model

Four months ago I wrote that SailWP was free. "No premium tier, no upsell, no account required."

The theme is still free. Everything I built into it: SEO, analytics, two-factor authentication, cookie consent, multilingual support, the setup wizard. All free. Same as day one.

What changed is the AI page builder. It now has a paid tier.

When I added the AI page builder, it was an experiment. Describe your business in a few sentences, get a complete web page. It worked. I kept improving it.

AI models cost money per request. Every page someone generates uses compute that I pay for. The free tier gives you 50 generations. That's enough to build a full website, try different layouts, iterate until you're happy. Fifty is sustainable. Five hundred is not. And the people who love this feature tend to use it a lot.

What's free, what's paid

The theme is free. Always will be. Every feature ships with the free version: SEO with meta titles and structured data, privacy-first analytics (no cookies, no consent wall), two-factor auth, cookie consent, multilingual support, backups, the setup wizard, and 50 AI page generations.

Pro costs 25 euro per month. You get 15 pages per month from a top-tier AI model, 100 standard actions (edits, translations, section changes), and AI-generated images for your pages. Or you can buy credit packs: 50 credits for 10 euro, 150 for 25. No subscription, no expiration.

If 50 free generations is enough, you never pay anything.

The economics

WordPress is free. But nobody runs a WordPress site for free. You pay for hosting. You pay for a domain. Then you pay for plugins: Yoast for SEO, Wordfence for security, Elementor for page building, WPML for translation. Most people spend 200 to 400 euro per year on plugins before their site does what it should do out of the box.

SailWP includes what those plugins charge for. The things that don't cost me money to provide are free. The thing that does (AI compute, per request, every time) has a paid option.

I think that's a fair trade. The free version already does more than most themes with five plugins bolted on.

If you've been following the SailWP posts, yes, this is different from what I said in March. I said no premium tier. Then I shipped the best feature of the entire project, and running it for free at scale turned out to be unsustainable.

I'd rather be honest about that than pretend the original plan always included paid credits. It didn't. The product changed because the AI worked better than I expected and people wanted more of it. That's a good problem to have, and charging for the expensive part is the honest solution.

The core promise holds. WordPress should include the basics out of the box. SailWP does. The AI is extra. The extra costs money.

SailWP is free to download. Pro starts at 25 euro per month.