It was a poem.
Now it is a billboard.
WordPress was a piece of craft you could read end to end. Somewhere along the way the money arrived, and the software quietly started selling to the person using it. We have been here for the whole of it — and we think it went too far.
We were here when the version still started with a 1
We started giving back to this ecosystem in the years when WordPress releases were still numbered 1.x — themes, plugins, translations, forum answers, the unglamorous parts nobody puts on a landing page.
Twenty-plus years later most of us are still here, still shipping. That is the whole credential. We are not a company that discovered WordPress last year because the market looked large.
Open source did not fail. It got monetised.
Capital arrived, and with it a way of thinking that treats a person's admin screen as advertising inventory. Open a random WordPress installation today and count what is competing for attention before you can do the thing you came to do.
Behind the banners sits a steady traffic of requests nobody asked for: news feeds, recommendation payloads, promotional bundles, license checks phoning home on a schedule. None of it makes the site faster, safer or easier to run. It exists because attention converts.
Developers should be paid. That was never the argument.
Maintenance is real work, and unpaid maintenance is how good projects quietly die. We have no quarrel with anyone charging money for software, and we are not asking anyone to work for free.
The quarrel is with what got normalised along the way: the idea that shipping a product is a licence to keep selling to the person who already installed it. That is a different thing from being paid for your work, and the industry sailed well past it.
We rebuild them. All of them. From zero.
Every plugin a WordPress site essentially needs, written again rather than forked or reskinned — small enough that you can read the source in an afternoon, and maintained on a schedule instead of whenever something breaks.
No banners
Nothing of ours will ever appear in your admin because we wanted your attention.
No phoning home
No telemetry, no license key checking in on a schedule, no analytics beacon.
Readable
Small classes, strict types, PSR-4. You can audit what you install.
Maintained
On a schedule, not when something finally breaks in production.
Our business does not run on these plugins
That is the part that makes everything above possible. We earn our living elsewhere, so these packages never have to carry a revenue target — which is exactly what turns a plugin into a billboard.
We take a great deal from this ecosystem: the software, the standards, twenty years of other people's unpaid work. Putting these plugins into the commons is the honest way to settle up. It is not charity and it is not marketing.
If you take from the commons, you put something back. That is the whole business model.
Read the source, then decide
Every claim on this page is checkable in the repositories. That is deliberate — a manifesto nobody can verify is just advertising with better typography.