He Sold WordPress's Next Era. Now He Calls WordPress Dead.
The Etch pre-sale said: "Install WordPress. Install Etch. Do your work." Two years later, Kevin Geary said of WordPress: "This is a dead platform."
In September 2024, Kevin Geary’s company was pre-selling Etch, a builder for WordPress. The pre-sale slide made this promise: “The de facto native environment for professional work in WordPress.” In plain words, Etch would be the standard place to do professional WordPress work.
That’s what people bought: WordPress’s next era, tagged #WPERA4.
Twenty months later, on 12 May 2026, Geary said Etch couldn’t keep working only inside “the slowly rotting carcass of the WordPress dinosaur where there’s zero excitement”.
On 25 August, he said this about WordPress: “This is a dead product. This is a dead platform.” etchwpstudio.com, an independent critical site not run by Etch, sets that against his July 2025 line: “All of this can be fixed without abandoning WordPress”.
Read that with your receipt in your inbox.
Now watch where the work’s going. The FAQ for Etch Studio calls Studio “the same Etch builder, just without WordPress”. It also says “most new features will be built in Etch Studio first”.
The same FAQ estimates eight out of ten agency sites can be built on Studio. Studio is a subscription, and the FAQ says “there won’t be a lifetime deal for it”. Etch Studio is also the first item on Etch’s Current Priorities page.
Etch’s pricing page says the whole thing is “100% privately funded through our highly successful pre-sale campaigns”. So people paid to build the future of WordPress. Now the founder calls WordPress dead, most new features start in Studio, and lifetime licences don’t include Studio.
EtchWP is the WordPress version of Etch, and the FAQ says “EtchWP is absolutely not dead”. It adds that EtchWP still ships updates, and that EtchWP customers get a reduced Studio rate. That’s a discount on a monthly bill, $10 off according to etchwpstudio.com, for a product that wasn’t in the pitch.
You can’t be the de facto environment for professional WordPress work while your founder tells everyone the platform’s dead. By my count from the pre-sale date, the slide’s date for this is about September 2027. In my view this promise is gone, whatever the date says.