$1,299. No Refunds. Here's What He Didn't Deliver.

Up to $1,299 up front.

That’s what Kevin Geary asked for in September 2024 for EtchWP, the Etch site builder for WordPress. Nothing had shipped. The pre-sale came with a strict no-refunds policy.

People paid. Here’s what’s missing.

• Integration with WooCommerce, the WordPress shop plugin, is not available. There are no shop elements, and the product template is striped placeholders.
• Top buyers were offered a marketplace discount. The marketplace doesn’t exist.
• Core blocks, the ones built into WordPress, were dropped. Every element is saved as Etch’s own blocks.
• The promise was “Etch doesn’t trap your content”. I switched Etch off and my page came up empty.
• Etch was going to eliminate SEO plugins. It has no SEO panel, and it just added compatibility with the SEO plugin Yoast.
• It was going to eliminate ACF and other custom field plugins. Its docs call its own fields a “playground”, and Geary recommended ACF in April 2026.
• It was going to eliminate performance plugins. All it has is image handling.
• Content relationships still need ACF or Meta Box. Etch has no relationship field of its own.
• Bulk-creating pages isn’t in the Content Hub. The docs only offer it through the experimental AI Build Mode.
• Version control is not available.
• Native faceting, meaning built-in filters, isn’t there. The docs say “Coming soon…”
• Mixins, the infinite canvas and “Sketches” are not in the builder.
• A stable V1 was due in September 2025. It came on 30 January 2026.
• Etch was going to be the de facto WordPress environment. Geary calls WordPress dead.
• “Unprecedented” transparency was the pitch. The V1 announcement lists a “Top Secret Exploratory Mission” next.
• An advisory board was on the slides. I can find no public trace of it.

The deadlines went too

The pricing page says “Etch V1 will be production stable in September 2025.” Version 1.0 is dated 30 January 2026. That line is still up there, more than a year past its own date.

On the slide, year two was large sites and e-commerce. That was September 2026. There’s no native WooCommerce, and his own docs call the fields a playground.

Before you give him money

He told you how this works himself. In 2019, he said “your audience will pay you to create the thing”, and “you don’t even have to put in the risk”.

So don’t take the risk for him. Pay for what exists today. Ignore every “eventually” and every asterisk on the pricing page. If it hasn’t got a date, assume it isn’t coming.

And if you bought in the pre-sale, get your receipt out, go down this list, and ask his company, Digital Gravy, for a date on everything you paid for.