Liquid Web Killed StellarWP. The Plugins Survived. The Trust Didn’t.
In loving memory of
StellarWP
May 11, 2021 – May 12, 2026
Beloved home of LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, The Events Calendar and IconicWP.
Died suddenly of a rebrand, announced in a blog post that never once said its name. Survived by its plugins, now living with relatives at Nexcess.
In lieu of flowers, check your renewal date.
Liquid Web retired the StellarWP brand in May, and on October 14 it told customers that renewals on or after November 16 get moved into one $350-a-year bundle of Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar and Give. The plugins are still shipping updates, so this isn’t a “the code is dead” rant. It’s a rant about trust, pricing, and how a lot of us found out.
Quick disclosure before I get cranky: DigiSavvy builds on LearnDash, and we have client sites running these plugins. That’s why I care. This isn’t a competitor taking shots. It’s a customer with a stake and a bad mood.
I’ll also admit I read the original acquisition press releases the way most of us read press releases: fast, and with way too much faith.
How did we get here?
The receipts, in order:
- May 2021: Liquid Web buys GiveWP and launches StellarWP as the umbrella brand. The announcement said GiveWP “will continue to operate as an independent unit.”
- June 2021: StellarWP adds IconicWP, the maker of WooCommerce plugins like Flux Checkout and WooThumbs.
- April 2023: private equity firm One Equity Partners completes its acquisition of Liquid Web and forms a new holding company, CloudOne Digital.
- May 12, 2026: the product sites for GiveWP, LearnDash, Kadence and The Events Calendar start redirecting to Liquid Web pages. Liquid Web’s announcement says SolidWP, Iconic, Restrict Content Pro and MemberDash “are no longer being sold as standalone products.” Iconic’s WooCommerce tools move into Kadence Shop Kit. Search Engine Journal covered the backlash, including lifetime Kadence owners who couldn’t find their downloads.
- October 14, 2026: a town hall announces the bundle. The recap says that starting with renewals on or after November 16, the four products “come together as one software package: the Nexcess plugin stack.”
From where I sit, that’s a long way from “independent unit.”
The “optional” receipt
Here’s what Liquid Web said on May 12, and the page still carried this wording in an archive dated October 6:
Your current plan, pricing, and tools remain the same unless you choose to upgrade. This is a new option for customers who want more, not a forced migration.
Here’s the FAQ on the new package page:
Can I still buy just one product? No. Every plan now includes all four products, starting at $350 a year for one site.
Do nothing and we’ll move you to the package at your next renewal.
And if you hold several subscriptions, the town hall recap says: “The first renewal to come up becomes the stack. The other subscriptions are canceled when the stack is applied.”
Fair is fair: the May promise was about your plan and price while your subscription is active, and the change kicks in at renewal. So it’s technically consistent. It also feels like Darth Vader’s “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Judge for yourself.
Let’s talk money
Price hikes suck. Give’s are the ones that hurt most. These are list prices I pulled from the vendors’ own pages and archived copies of them:
| Product | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Give, entry paid tier | $149/yr (Basic, March 2026) | $199 (Essentials, May 12), then $399 (Pro) as the lowest tier shown now |
| Kadence, Pro tier | $219/yr (May 12) | $299/yr (October 1) |
| The “stack,” all four products | n/a | $350/yr for 1 site, $599 for 10, $999 for 100 (source) |
Caveats, because I’d want them if I were reading this: tier names and contents changed along the way, so it’s not a perfect like-for-like. I also haven’t seen anyone’s actual renewal invoice, so I can’t tell you what your renewal will say. And I couldn’t verify a clean “before” price for LearnDash, so I’m not going to make one up.
Here’s the fairness note. If you actually use all four products, the bundle can be cheaper than buying them one by one. An agency running a hundred sites for $999 a year is a real deal. Liquid Web also says one version of each product means fixes can reach you sooner, which is a reasonable argument. Some plans are exempt too, including Kadence subscriptions, Restrict Content Pro and lifetime licenses.
But if you use one of the four, the math runs the other way. The FAQ says you can’t buy just that one.
The plugins aren’t dead (that’s not my beef)
I want to be careful here. Give, The Events Calendar and Kadence all shipped releases this month: Give 4.19.0, The Events Calendar 6.18.2 and Kadence Blocks 3.8.0. Liquid Web’s own recap even says “Roadmaps are public again.” Which makes me wonder what they were for a while.
My beef is the uncertainty. These are widely used, much-loved products that businesses are built on, and the people building on them now have to guess what the vendor’s plan is. Retired features and bundles get critical security patches only through April 2027. If you run a course business on LearnDash (we write about hiring a LearnDash developer and do LearnDash consulting for exactly this reason), “will this still be the thing I bought in two years?” is a business question, not a vibes question.
I made a similar point about Automattic: your WordPress site doesn’t care who runs the company, but your business cares who owns your plugins. Vendors get bought. Plan like they will.
A tip of the hat to Awesome Motive
Credit where it’s due: Awesome Motive saw a frayed customer base and moved fast. They named Liquid Web, too. WPBeginner’s “StellarWP Is No More” went up May 15 and calls Liquid Web “the same parent that owns Nexcess.”
It’s sharp marketing, and it worked. It’s also funny that the replacements it recommends for GiveWP, LearnDash and Restrict Content Pro are Charitable and MemberPress, both of which sit in Awesome Motive’s own portfolio. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m saying that guide is also a sales page.
Then, per Awesome Motive’s founder, an October 15 post on X pitched people hit by “yet another Private Equity backed outrageous price increase” with the competitor names blanked out as “[REDACTED]”. That’s the part that made me laugh out loud.
One more squint worth applying. Charitable’s Pro plan is $199 for the first year and renews at $399. That’s the same $399 Give Pro costs now. Read the renewal line on everybody’s pricing page, including the folks rescuing you.
What would I do before November 16?
Whether you’re an owner or an agency, here’s the short list:
- Check your renewal date. Customers renewing between November 16 and December 1 were emailed the week of October 12, and the portal shows your new plan from November 3. Per the recap, you can cancel any time before the renewal date.
- Audit which of the four you actually use. One plugin, or all four? That decides whether the bundle is a bargain or a tax.
- Export everything. Data, license keys, invoices, plugin zips. Kadence lifetime owners couldn’t find theirs in May, so don’t wait.
- Don’t just let it lapse. The FAQ says your site won’t break, but you’ll lose support, automatic updates and security patches. That’s a bad deal for any site that takes payments. If patching isn’t your day job, website maintenance is what that’s for, and our pricing is public.
- Test alternatives on staging. Never in production. Every one of these is a migration project, not a drop-in.
Alternatives worth a look
Fairly named, including the ones that aren’t Awesome Motive’s. For donations: Charitable (Awesome Motive) and Paymattic, which is also selling into this moment. For courses and memberships: MemberPress (Awesome Motive), Paid Memberships Pro, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS. For events: Sugar Calendar (Awesome Motive). I put together a comparison of membership site builders if that’s your corner of the stack.
For building websites, and this is the one I left off until Mike McAlister called it out on X: Ollie. If Kadence was your site-building layer, Ollie is a real option. It’s a block theme built for the native WordPress site editor, the base theme is free on WordPress.org, and Ollie Pro adds a library of hundreds of patterns, starter sites, a setup wizard and editor extensions like a menu designer and animations.
Full disclosure: I’ve been following Mike’s work since the Array Themes days, so I’m a fan. Ollie is built and supported by Mike and Patrick Posner, two people with a long track record in WordPress, and that’s exactly the kind of owner I want behind a tool my sites depend on.
Everyone on that list is also a vendor with a price page and an owner, so apply the same squint to all of them.
So here’s my question for you, folks: what did your renewal email say, and did anyone warn you before it showed up?
