Flywheel Raises $1.2M For Its Designer-Centric WordPress Hosting Platform

The open-source WordPress software runs a huge chunk of all of the sites on the Internet, so it’s no surprise that there’s also a massive ecosystem that has sprung up around the platform. These days, there’s a specialized WordPress service for virtually any niche you can think of.

Omaha-based Flywheel is one of those services. It focuses on designers, freelancers and creative agencies that need a managed WordPress platform to build and manage their clients’ sites. Today, the company announced that it has raised a $1.2 million funding round.

The round was led by Omaha-based Linseed Capital, with participation from Chicago’s Lightbank and Hyde Park Venture Partners, as well as Detroit-based Ludlow Ventures.

Flywheel tells me it plans to use this new funding to focus on product development. “In the immediate future we have staging sites and an affiliate/referral program launching,” Flywheel CEO and co-founder Dusty Davidson told me earlier this week. “Beyond that it’s things like an API and 3rd party integrations, and other features to improve the workflow of designers and agencies building sites on WordPress.”

The service already focuses on ensuring that its workflow is as straightforward as possible for its users. Creating a new site already just takes a few seconds and once it’s up and running, the service makes it easy to add collaborators, bill clients and do most of the other things that designers and freelancers need to handle when they work on a WordPress project. One nice feature of Flywheel is that users only pay for a site once it goes live — and at that point, it’s likely the client who will pay the hosting bill anyway.

Flywheel’s pricing is mostly based on how many visits a site gets per month and starts at $15/month for up to 5,000 visits. Starting today, the service also offers its users bulk pricing. For $100 a month, they can run up to 10 sites with an aggregate total of 150,000 visits on the service or 25 sites with 500,000 visits for $250 a month.