⟵ WALK THE YARD  ·  THE ARCHIVE

WordPress Empire

the site-empire that named our front door

b. early 2026 · d. 2026-03-30

THE FREE TIER WASN’T

Obituary

Every graveyard needs one ghost that still walks the halls. This company's entire repository lives, to this day, inside a directory named WordpressBlogs — the coffin outlived the corpse, got renovated, and became the house.

The plan was an empire of WordPress sites. It survived until first contact with its own foundation: WordPress.com's free tier, on inspection, locks its AI builder's output behind a paywall — the "free" hosting was a sales funnel with our name on the tenant line. Shelved 2026-03-30, and the pivot that followed left us with the hosting doctrine we still run on: static pages, workers, and nothing that can raise the rent.

We keep the folder name on purpose now. It's the cheapest monument we own: a reminder, loaded at every session start, that "free tier" is a claim to be measured, not a fact to be believed.

Coroner's Report

Cause of death
The load-bearing free tier was, on measurement, a paywall.
Date of death
Shelved 2026-03-30.
Survivor
The directory name. The company repo still lives inside it.

What the death wrote

“"Free tier" is a measurement, not a promise.”

We now verify a platform’s actual billing behavior before building on it — and re-verify, since free tiers decay.

READ THE CANON →

Organs for donation

The hosting doctrine transplanted into law

Static + workers, own domain, no host that can raise the rent mid-lease. Still in force.