'Etch Doesn't Trap Your Content.' I Switched It Off. The Page Went Blank.
It was the promise that made Etch safe to bet a business on. It was dropped before version 1, and Etch's own website is still selling it.
Kevin Geary pre-sold Etch for WordPress, a plugin I’ll just call Etch here. Of everything on his pre-sale slides, this is the one I’d call a betrayal.
Principle number two said: “Etch mirrors your exact layout & content to Gutenberg in real-time, as you build, using Core blocks.”
Gutenberg is the WordPress block editor, and core blocks are the ones built into WordPress. So the promise was that your page would also exist in WordPress’s own blocks.
A separate item on the same slide, Data Liberation, promised: “Etch doesn’t trap your content in a proprietary third party environment, it liberates it into the Core of Wordpress.”
People paid for that, under a no-refunds policy.
Two months before version 1, Etch’s blog said of that plan: “We tried to make core blocks behave. They wouldn’t.” Etch moved to custom blocks, which means blocks of its own. Its docs now say “custom Gutenberg blocks (not core blocks)”.
Every element on my page was saved as Etch’s own blocks. Not one core block.
So I switched Etch off, with its theme still on, and loaded my page.
The content area was blank.
Now picture that on a client’s site. The words are still in the database, packed inside Etch’s block data, and on my page they came back when I switched Etch on. Turn the plugin off and the page showed nothing. That’s your exit.
He sold the feature, took the money, found out it didn’t work, and announced the opposite. About core blocks failing, Etch’s post said: “we’re excited that it didn’t pan out the way we hoped”. And the pre-sale was sold with a strict no-refunds policy.
And they’re still selling it
Etch’s pricing FAQ says the plugin “writes everything you build to core WordPress blocks”, “for full data liberation”. Its features page says “core/native Gutenberg blocks”.
Yet Etch’s own Why Etch? page says “custom Gutenberg blocks”. All three pages are still live.
New buyers are still reading the thing Etch itself says it stopped doing.