Pre-Sold Software and the Limits of the Lifetime Deal: A Case Study of the Etch Site Builder for WordPress, 2024–2026

Commercial plugins for WordPress are increasingly financed before they exist, through non-refundable "lifetime" pre-sales sold to the developer's own audience. This paper examines one such case: Etch, avisual site builder pre-sold in September 2024 by Digital Gravy at tiersof $499, $799 and $1,299 under a stated no-refunds policy. Using only public records (archived and current vendor pages, the vendor's release changelog, documentation, livestream recordings, social-media posts anda state business register), we compare the commitments made at the pointof sale with the product's state in November 2026. We find that the product shipped a stable version four months after its stated date and has released frequently since, but that several commitments attached tothe higher tiers remain unavailable, that one architectural promise wasreversed before version 1.0 while still appearing on the current pricing page, and that the vendor redirected new development toward a separately billed hosted product not covered by the lifetime licences.We describe the mechanisms by which lifetime pre-sales transferdevelopment risk from vendor to customer, set out the vendor's own stated reasons for the changes, and propose a small set of disclosures that would let buyers price that risk.