After a decade of building, learning, and growing, we’ve made the difficult decision to sunset RatingWidget by the end of 2025.

What started as a side project born out of passion grew into a full-fledged business that proudly served thousands of websites and eCommerce stores across the world. Over the last 10 years, we’ve helped businesses gather millions of customer reviews through simple, embeddable star ratings—and we couldn’t be more grateful for the journey.

But like many long-running products, our story reached a turning point.

As the years went on, our focus began to shift. Growth slowed, and we found fewer opportunities to build exciting new features that pushed the product forward. At the same time, costs steadily climbed—especially on the server side. As a freemium model, most of those costs were driven by free users, and it’s reached a point where we’re paying thousands of dollars each month just to keep the lights on.

Platforms like Shopify, Wix, and WordPress have also continued to evolve at a fast pace. Staying compliant with their ever-changing listing and integration requirements takes constant development and QA resources. Meanwhile, changes in Google’s algorithm and structured data formats eroded the visibility and value of some of our most loved features—like rich snippets that once boosted user engagement.

The final straw? The financials no longer make sense. The combined cost of servers, support, and ongoing development now outweighs the revenue the business brings in. And as much as we’d love to keep the service running indefinitely, it’s simply no longer sustainable.

We’ll be winding things down gradually to give everyone enough time to export data, migrate, or make necessary changes. We’ll continue to support existing users until 20 December 2025. We’ll outline the full shutdown timeline in the next few weeks.

If you’ve ever used RatingWidget, thank you. Whether you were a free user adding stars to your blog, or a paying customer integrating us into your Shopify store, we appreciate every bit of feedback, trust, and love you gave us along the way.

This chapter may be closing, but we’re proud of what we built—and even more proud of the community that rallied behind it.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

 The RatingWidget Team