Recently it was made public that Matt Mullenweg personally has the ability to stop WordPress websites from getting automatically getting security updates from WordPress.org. That was exposed when he blocked customers of WP Engine from getting those updates. He can do that because he apparently personally owns the WordPress website. He provides various justifications for that. Including that someone independently wealthy is needed to subsidize the website, “[t]hey need to be independently wealthy to subsidize http://W.org, which serves 30k requests a second at peak.” It doesn’t actually need to be owned by an individual, but whoever owned, there is the question of how much it costs to run it. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t provided accounting how much it costs to run and how much money he is making off it (he apparently has income from the website). So how much does it cost? The answers coming from his side vary significantly.

On September 26, Matt Mullenweg put the price of supporting only the estimated 1.5 million website hosted with WP Engine as costing millions of dollars, “You could imagine that probably costing millions of dollars per year in infrastructure and cost, development time, everything to support those 1.5 million sites.”

In an October 30 filing by lawyers representing Matt Mullenweg, the cost was estimated at $800,000 a year, “the continued maintenance and operation of the Website incurs an estimated $800,000.00 in administrative, server and developer costs, per year.”

If the cost is closer to the lawyers’ estimate, it seems reasonable that the website could be paying for itself, based on the amount of money that could be coming in from the web hosts recommend by the website.