In January 2026, VWO (built by Wingify) formally merged with AB Tasty under Everstone Capital, which had taken a majority stake in Wingify the year before. The combined company is now an enterprise optimization platform — 4,000+ customers, 800+ employees, $100M+ ARR.
The part that matters if you're not an enterprise customer: VWO is phasing out its free tier. Existing free users got an email notice. New signups now get a 30-day trial instead of a permanent free plan. Entry-level paid pricing has moved well past the "try it on a side project" range into the hundreds of dollars a month — exact tiers vary depending on which page of VWO's own site you land on, which is itself a sign of a pricing structure mid-overhaul, not settled.
None of this is a knock on VWO. A profitable, scaling company moving upmarket after a PE acquisition is a normal story. But it's worth naming plainly for anyone who bookmarked VWO years ago as "the free A/B testing tool for small teams" — that tool doesn't exist anymore. If your growth stack still assumes a free CRO tool tier exists at the VWO/Hotjar end of the market, it's worth checking which of your assumptions from 2023 are still true in 2026. Hotjar's story is similar: fully merged into Contentsquare by 2025, migration ongoing through this year.
The honest takeaway for a bootstrapped founder isn't "switch tools." It's that the CRO tooling market has split into two tiers — enterprise suites with enterprise pricing, and a long tail of smaller point tools — and assuming last year's pricing still holds is a bad habit.