Dear customers (and future customers),
We built Etch for WordPress because that is where most of you were building at the time. But what we actually created was a new way of working as a developer in general: visual when you want it, real HTML, CSS, and JS underneath, and nothing hidden from you.
The principles behind that have not shifted. Etch is a professional tool, designed and built to make professional, scalable, maintainable web development lightning fast. Clean output you would be proud to hand off with build speed that comes from the workflow itself, not from cutting corners.
Three things have changed, though: (1) Wordpress; (2) the way people prefer to work; (3) and the destinations people want to publish to.
WordPress first. Many of you have already left it, and you have told us why: leadership turmoil, public drama, recurring security problems, infrastructure that has not kept pace, and no real need for *most* projects. We understand. WordPress gave many of us our start and still runs a large share of the web, so we are not walking away from it. But it should be one option among several, not a condition of using Etch.
Then the work itself. Agentic development showed people something important: they no longer need to depend on WordPress and its plugin ecosystem to build serious sites. When an agent can build exactly what you describe, in a builder that visually abstracts & standardizes everything, you are in full command of the result. The archaic WordPress infrastructure stops being a necessary burden and becomes an optional one.
And finally, where the work ends up. A site today might live on a static host, a CDN, or an edge network, and increasingly it needs to publish to more than one of those. Developers want to pick the destination per project, or change it later, without changing how they build. A CMS that only knows how to publish to itself cannot offer that.
That's where Etch Studio comes in. It is the builder you already use, attached to a lightweight CMS system, that publishes static files to any destination (currently Cloudflare, with plans to expand). For the 80 to 85% of sites agencies and freelancers actually build (marketing sites, landing pages, portfolios, small content sites), Etch Studio can replace WordPress outright. It's all the stuff you need (content types, custom fields, relationships, loops, logic, and interactivity) with none of the baggage.
The principle behind this shift is simple: consistency in how you build, flexibility in where you publish. The same syntax, styling system, components, loops, and AI workflows behave identically whether the output lands in WordPress, Shopify, or on a static host. Learn Etch once and use it everywhere.
The choice is yours. If you need WordPress (its plugins, its ecosystem, a client who already lives there), use Etch for WordPress. If you do not need WordPress, use Etch Studio and skip the overhead. Same builder, same skills, different destination.
Thank you for building with us. Nothing you rely on today goes away. You simply have more places to take it. And, in the future, we hope to make it easy to migrate between the two platforms with just a few clicks so you never have to sweat about which route to take on any given project.
Kevin Geary, CEO
Digital Gravy
