Yesterday, my Kadence Pro features stopped working.
Nothing broke. No card expired. I did not cancel anything. The lifetime license I paid for years ago, the one with the word lifetime printed on the invoice, no longer unlocks what it was sold to unlock. If I want those features back, Liquid Web would like me to start a monthly subscription.
That is not a renewal. That is a retraction.
I am not the only one. My DMs, my inbox, every WordPress Slack and Discord I am in is asking the same question: did this happen to you too? Yes. It did. And it is not going to stop unless the community starts treating "lifetime" as a promise rather than a marketing word.
What Actually Happened
On May 12, 2026, Liquid Web folded its WordPress software portfolio into four headline products: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and Give. The familiar standalone sites for KadenceWP, SolidWP, IconicWP, Restrict Content Pro, and MemberDash now redirect to liquidweb.com. The standalone products themselves are gone; their features have been absorbed into Kadence and LearnDash and bundled into new plans.
The official line is friendly. Existing licenses are still valid. Pricing stays the same. Nothing is being forced on anyone.
And then comes the sentence that carries the entire problem: your current setup keeps working "as long as your subscription remains active." Once it lapses, you have to buy one of the new plans to get the features back.
For someone on a yearly plan, that sounds normal. For anyone holding a Kadence Lifetime Bundle, paid in full, sold as a single payment for lifetime support, updates, and future products, that sentence is the moment the rug got pulled. A lifetime license that requires an active subscription is not a lifetime license. It is a subscription with a misleading label.
The Kadence theme on WordPress.org still installs. Free features still work. But Pro is now plan-gated through Liquid Web's portal, and reports are already piling up of permanent Liquid Web admin panels added by recent theme updates that cannot be dismissed. The product is no longer what it was sold as.
Lifetime Is Not a Vibe. It Is a Contract.
There is a perfectly fair counter-argument to all of this, and I want to put it on the table before knocking it down.
Software is expensive to maintain. Hosting costs, security updates, support staff, and developers all keep going up. Lifetime deals priced for a 2019 cost base do not scale into 2026. Companies get acquired. Roadmaps change. Founders move on. None of that is anyone's fault in particular.
All of which is true. None of which is the customer's problem.
If your business model cannot sustain a lifetime promise, the responsible move is to stop selling lifetime, refund anyone who wants out, and grandfather the rest. The responsible move is not to keep collecting "one-time lifetime" payments right up until the moment you fold the brand into a parent and let "subscription required" do the dirty work the marketing copy never said out loud.
An acquisition is not a fresh start on existing contracts. New ownership inherits the obligations along with the assets. "We did not sell you that license, the old company did" is the corporate equivalent of inheriting a house and refusing to honour the neighbour's right of way because you were not there when it was agreed.
Lifetime is not vibes. It is a contract. The whole point of the word is that it removes ambiguity. Anyone who treats it as flexible after the payment has cleared is not running into a sustainability problem. They are running a different business model than the one their customers thought they were paying for.
This Is a Pattern, and the Community Knows It
The hard part is that Kadence is not the villain in isolation. It is the latest chapter in a story the WordPress space has been telling itself for years.
Plugin gets popular. Plugin gets acquired by a hosting company or a holding group. Pricing model "evolves." Lifetime customers get quietly migrated into a tier where the most useful features sit behind an active sub. Founder leaves. Roadmap drifts. Community grumbles. Everyone moves on, until the next plugin.
We watched it across multiple iThemes products. We watched it across StellarWP. We watched it with the slow strangling of agency lifetime deals at half a dozen tool vendors. Each individual move can be justified on its own terms. The aggregate effect is that nobody in the WordPress ecosystem fully trusts a "lifetime" claim anymore, and the people building real businesses on top of these tools are paying for that lost trust with their planning horizon.
The lesson is not "stop buying lifetime." The lesson is that lifetime, as a word, has been hollowed out by people who did not mean it. That is fixable. It just requires someone to actually mean it.
What We Are Building at Signocore
I will not pretend this is a neutral observation. The reason I am writing this is that I am building the alternative.
Signocore is a WordPress platform and agency offering with one non-negotiable rule baked into the foundation: when we say lifetime, we mean lifetime. Not "lifetime as long as the brand exists." Not "lifetime until we get acquired." Not "lifetime as long as your subscription remains active." Lifetime. The word does the work the word was always supposed to do.
That principle shapes everything else. It shapes how we structure the company so it cannot be quietly absorbed into a hosting conglomerate. It shapes how we price, with real numbers that survive a real cost base rather than loss-leader deals priced to be reneged on later. It shapes our agency offering, where clients who buy in get a promise that does not have an asterisk on the renewal page.
It also shapes the product. Signocore Slate is the theme we are building as part of this. A fast, modern, block-first WordPress theme designed for the people Kadence used to be designed for, before Kadence stopped being designed for them. A slate is a fresh surface to build on, and a material that lasts decades. We picked the name for both reasons.
There is no waitlist, no signup form, no growth-hack funnel attached to this post. If any of the above resonates, the most useful thing you can do is follow along at signocore.com. We will ship when we ship, and when we do, the terms will read the way the marketing reads.
Lifetime Means Lifetime. Period.
The Kadence situation is not a betrayal because Liquid Web is uniquely bad. It is a betrayal because, like a dozen acquisitions before it, the company sold a promise its successors decided not to keep. The WordPress ecosystem has accepted that pattern as normal for too long, and the bill is now arriving in the form of customers who no longer believe the word on the invoice.
Signocore exists to put the word back. Lifetime means lifetime. If a company cannot honour that, it should not sell it. If it sells it anyway, customers are right to be angry, and the rest of us are right to build something better.
