If you’ve been tracking the recent product rollout from Digital Gravy, you know their new website builder, Etch WP, launched with a massive amount of hype. It was marketed as a revolutionary “clean code” visual development environment that would completely shake up front-end development in WordPress.
But despite all the promises of a stable future, there is a lot of buzz right now about the Etch WP team leaving, and web agencies are trying to figure out exactly what is happening behind the scenes at Digital Gravy.
The Timeline: How Recent is Etch WP?
To understand why this internal shakeup is causing so much panic, you have to look at how incredibly fresh this software actually is.
- September 2024: Digital Gravy announced Etch WP, selling 1,500 pre-sale licenses almost instantly before even showing an alpha version.
- January 30, 2026: Etch WP officially reached its v1.0 stable release milestone, marking the point where it was deemed safe for client websites.
This means that Etch WP v1.0 has only been out for a few months. Agencies had barely begun migrating their client pipelines over to this new environment before the team that built it started to fracture.
What is the Digital Gravy Drama?
If you look at recent Reddit threads and community posts, a few major things have shaken users up:
- Woji Left: One of Digital Gravy’s highly skilled core developers parted ways with the team and immediately launched a third-party addon extension called “Oh My Etch.” Because the stable v1.0 release of Etch WP lacked native, advanced dynamic filtering right out of the box, Woji independently built his own solution to fill that massive feature gap. This immediately signaled to agencies that they were already going to have to buy separate spinoff tools just to get basic functionality.
- Tomi Harvánek & Brendan Are Gone: Tomi, the Lead Designer who built Frames for Figma and served as the helpful, transparent face of their user community, quietly vanished from the Digital Gravy team page along with another team member, Brendan.
- Deleted Comments: When concerned users dropped questions in the latest Etch livestream asking why the core team was dissolving so quickly after the 1.0 launch, their comments were instantly deleted by Digital Gravy moderators.
The Real Cost of the WordPress Plugin Trap
For any web agency, this Digital Gravy drama is a huge wakeup call about the hidden financial and structural risks of the WordPress plugin ecosystem.
To build a professional site using this specific stack, agencies are looking at a heavy premium:
- Etch WP Elite Lifetime Deal: $1,299
- Automatic.css (ACSS Add-on): $399
- Total Stack Cost: $1,698 upfront (not including hosting, security, or e-commerce plugins).
When you sink nearly $1,700 into a high-ticket plugin stack, you think you are securing your agency’s future. But you aren’t actually buying stable platform architecture. You are betting your entire business pipeline on a volatile lineup of independent contractors and a single, highly opinionated founder. If the internal culture sours and the talent walks out the door, your clients’ websites are left tethered to a compromised roadmap.
Even worse, you get trapped in the classic WordPress dependency loop. When the core team fractures, you end up having to buy more spinoff tools from ex-employees just to get basic features like dynamic filtering, while praying the next core update doesn’t break your site layout.
Related: Do you really own your WordPress website?
The WordPress Backdoor Scandal: Why 30+ “Trusted” Plugins Just Turned Malicious
Why Relying on WordPress Plugins Can Backfire (And How to Avoid It)
True Sovereignty Means a Unified Platform
Building a serious web business on a fragile, multi-vendor plugin stack means you are always at the mercy of someone else’s corporate drama, developer turnover, and comment-scrubbing.
True control means using a unified, independent website builder where the design engine, custom fields, and CMS are natively built under one roof. When you don’t have to piece your business together with third-party plugins, you get zero corporate revolving doors, zero hidden “success taxes,” and total peace of mind.
Other WordPress Plugins Drama:
WordPress Kirki Customizer Takeover: The Automatic Bait-and-Switch Plugin Trend
The WordPress Backdoor Scandal: Why 30+ “Trusted” Plugins Just Turned Malicious
WordPress vs Wp Engine Drama:
WP Engine Wins Court Order, Regains Full Access to WordPress.org in 72 Hours
The War on WordPress: WP Engine vs. Matt Mullenweg Heats Up (September 2024 Update)
Can WordPress Overthrow Matt Mullenweg? A Look at the Open-Source Power Struggle