EtchWP Is Alive and Well. WordPress Is Dead. Geary's Treating You Like a Fool.
On stream, WordPress is "a dead platform". On the page that takes your money, it's "viable, popular, and important".
Kevin Geary says WordPress is dead.
His pricing page says EtchWP, the product that only runs on WordPress, is fine.
Pick one. You can’t have both, and neither can he.
Here he is on 25 August, talking about WordPress: “This is a dead product. This is a dead platform.”
Two hours into the same stream: “Yeah, WP is dying for sure. 100%. It is.”
Here he is on 12 May, on why Etch couldn’t keep working only inside WordPress. He called it “the slowly rotting carcass of the WordPress dinosaur where there’s zero excitement”.
Now open the Etch pricing page. Same company. Same founder. Today it says this:
“EtchWP is absolutely not dead. WordPress is still a viable, popular, and important platform for building websites and is still a major ‘destination’ for Etch.”
Viable. Popular. Important.
So the rotting carcass is a major destination. Depends who’s listening, I suppose. The stream gets the funeral. The customer holding an EtchWP licence gets the reassurance.
I think that’s treating you like a fool. You were meant to hear one and not remember the other.
You’re a developer. You read changelogs for fun. You can hold two sentences in your head at once.
Read the rest of the page
The reassurance doesn’t even survive its own FAQ.
Scroll down. Most sites “don’t need WordPress’ heavy architecture, updates, and hosting”. You “really only need WordPress” when a project depends on something WordPress-specific. Eight out of ten agency sites, the FAQ estimates, can go on Studio, and Studio is “likely the better fit”.
That’s the important platform, a few questions later.
Then this: “most new features will be built in Etch Studio first”. They get ported to EtchWP afterwards. When? “We can’t give an exact timeline for each port.”
That’s what “absolutely not dead” means here. Your product gets the features second, on no date.
Under his 20 October stream, a viewer asked if EtchWP was going the way of Frames. Geary replied about a week later: “If WordPress becomes mostly irrelevant, and we can’t derive any income from it, should we still produce a product for it and just take endless losses?”
Then: “We will continue providing profitable products in marketplaces with healthy demand.”
That’s not “absolutely not dead”. That’s a condition. In my view, EtchWP gets built for as long as WordPress pays.
And Frames? “You can obviously see that frames was made obsolete by advances in AI workflows.” He sold that one too.
And Studio is the part you don’t get. It’s a subscription, and the FAQ says “there won’t be a lifetime deal for it”. Lifetime licences don’t include it.
The same page, again
Look at the EtchWP plans on that page. Every tier lists “WooCommerce Integration”.
Now look at the FAQ on that same page: “We still have plans to build our native Woocommerce integration.”
It’s on the plan. It’s also still a plan. People paid extra for that one.
Why it stings
Buyers weren’t asked up to $1,299 up front for a side project. They paid for what the pre-sale slide called “the de facto native environment for professional work in WordPress”. I’ve covered that one.
If you believe WordPress is dead, say so to the people still paying for the WordPress version. Put it on the pricing page. Tell them what that means for their licence.
If you believe it’s viable, popular and important, stop calling it a corpse on stream.
He’s picked neither. He’s kept both, one for each audience, and left you to work out which is true.
My money’s on the stream. Going by where the features go first, so is his.