I’ve been dissatisfied with the Echo commenting plug-in for WordPress for a while now.

The latest-but-last gripe has been with Echo performance.  It adds up to 3 seconds to the blog page load time.  And it can’t be fixed by any tweaks on Wisefaq.com.  Tweaks such as enabling Gzip compression. which I can’t change on their website.

Echo aren’t interested in doing any tweaks, they’re chasing the corporate dollar.  The price is run the Echo plug-in here has gone from $12 USD a year to $10 USD a month.

Chris Saad of Echo sums it up in this support post:

We appreciate your passion about Echo and its pricing – we really do. The reality for Echo is still the same as it’s been for some time now.

As a small startup our considerations are not just the cost of running the service, but the cost of support and the cost of the distraction to build a product for a totally different class of customer (in this case free or nearly free bloggers).

As you can tell from the changes to the Echo home page, Echo is now clearly designed for customers who are in the business of publishing. Business being the operative word.

They have very different needs than smaller bloggers (no more or less important, just different). Particularly in the areas of install, customization, support etc etc.

It’s a different business. One that others in the market are very well suited to execute on. I’m sure there is a provider that suits your needs. One size never fits all.

There are some free choices out there.  Disqus or IntenseDebate are two of them.  I’ve gone back to Disqus for the time being.