PhantomStudio vs Etch Studio: $199 Once, or $590 Every Year?
A visual builder and AI agent for Astro that writes real code to your own GitHub repo. It's in beta, so buy it for what it does today.
Etch Studio costs $590 a year on the annual plan, or $708 if you pay monthly. Its FAQ says there “won’t be a lifetime deal”.
PhantomStudio, which used to be called PhantomWP, sells one. It’s $199 once, for unlimited projects, client sites included, and every future update. The page says only a limited number of licences are available at that price, so check it before you plan around it.
Who’s behind it
This is the difference I’d weigh most.
PhantomStudio’s founder is Ovidiu Maghetiu. His page lists more than 20 years in web development. He founded WPCodeBox and was lead developer on WP All Import and WP All Export, so he has a long record in WordPress.
In my experience he follows through on what he promises. The pricing page lists what’s recently shipped: headless WooCommerce storefronts in beta, the PhantomWP Connect WordPress plugin and deploys to Cloudflare Workers.
Set that against the list of what Etch’s buyers are still waiting for.
What it is
You build in your browser. Design mode gives you layers, a live preview and a Style panel. Code mode gives you the code. Both edit the same files.
Underneath it’s a normal Astro project, in a repo under your own GitHub account. The FAQ says that if you leave, you take everything: “Clone it, host it anywhere, develop locally.”
That’s the part I care about. Stop using it and you still have your site.
The PhantomStudio YouTube channel is the best place to see it. You get the editor and the agent doing real work, with no angry sales pitch on top.
Keep WordPress, or don’t
Content can come from WordPress, Sanity, content collections or plain data files. If your clients know the WordPress editor, they can stay in it while the site itself is Astro.
Be careful with existing sites, though. PhantomStudio says themes and frontend plugin output “don’t transfer automatically”. You rebuild those in Astro.
Bring your own AI
The AI agent uses your own API key for Claude, OpenAI, Gemini and others. You see the bill, and you can read every file it touches.
What’s still in beta
It’s labelled v1.0 Beta, and WooCommerce storefronts are beta too. Starter and Agency plans, at $149 and $399 a year, are marked “coming soon”.
The code is yours. The editor runs in your browser, and the FAQ, still under the old PhantomWP name, says it runs on GitHub Codespaces. GitHub Free includes 120 core-hours a month, about 60 hours on a 2-core Codespace. One-click deploys go to Vercel or Cloudflare Workers, and the FAQ says you can take the code to any host.
If you’ve already bought a lifetime licence for a product that didn’t turn out as sold, you’ll want to pay for what’s there today, not the roadmap. This one has a 30-day money-back guarantee. Etch’s pre-sale buyers were sold under a strict no-refunds policy.
What you’d pay
Three years of Etch Studio on the annual plan is $1,770. PhantomStudio’s lifetime licence is $199, plus your own AI and hosting costs, and metered Codespaces charges if the free allowance isn’t enough.
