“My sense is that many enterprise WordPress administrators will think twice about continuing to use the software under these circumstances,” said IDC Research Manager Michele Rosen. “It’s such a shame to watch a leader in the open source community repeatedly sabotage his own project.”
“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.”
Yeah you don’t need to spend $40 a year just for a bio page anyway, that’s nearly as much as the lowest end shared tier of a Hetzner VPS, which should be enough to host your website and instances of some of your favourite self-hostable services.
For a simple static website, there are several free options, most of them being free tiers of paid services. Some even let you set up automation pipelines to rebuild the site when the source gets changed (if you set up something like a git repo with markdown files, to be ingested by a static site generator that turns your markdown into a website, for an example).
On the topic of this post in general, not your issue in particular: The average blog never needed to be dynamic anyway. Static site is always going to load faster than a bunch of PHP being run in the server and there’s soooo much less attack surface!