Hey WordPress Warriors, this is a long-overdue update on all things GridPane—what we’ve been working on this year, what we have planned for the future, PanelPress, add-ons, case studies, and so on.
Over the past year, our primary focus has been on the upcoming re-release of PanelPress and restructuring our plans/pricing. We’ll dig into everything else below.
Table of Contents
The Good
In the summer of 2024, we began to increase our focus on providing fully managed hosting for WordPress, specifically white-glove and bespoke hosting for WooCommerce.
This aspect of our business has grown exponentially, and it quickly became many times larger than all of our “self-managed hosting control panel” revenue combined. It has also given us invaluable qualitative feedback that has directly fed into everything we are developing—we use our dashboard, our APIs, and all of our connected tooling to provide world-class, fully managed hosting for complex WordPress workloads.
After years of developing the right tools for the job, we’ve decided that the highest and best use of all these capabilities is simply to turn around and offer these services as a fully Done For You solution to some of the highest-traffic, most valuable Woo shops on the planet.
And we will continue to develop and refine these tools for many years to come. As we’ll discuss shortly, there’s been a handful of reasons that we’ve been radio silent for nearly a year straight. But the single biggest reason is: we’ve been absolutely swamped by this aspect of the business, in the best way possible.
For those of you who’ve been concerned by our absence from social media, rest assured that we are here to stay. For better or worse, you’re stuck with us.
Indefinitely.
After many years of toil and scraping by, we are finally in a position to be able to call our own shots without the constant fear of diminishing runway or the distractions of raising additional capital.
Our biggest investors have always been our customers. And we are now in a position never to have to deviate from that single-minded “stakeholder” focus ever again. We’re building this team, this platform, and this community 100% on our own terms.
We are now in a position where we can expand our team, expand our services, and we’ll be able to speed up the development of new capabilities in 2026 and beyond. More on this in a moment.
The Bad
Ecosystem Turmoil
Beginning the fall of 2024, a whirlwind overtook the entire WordPress ecosystem. The giant feud that broke out between two of the largest players in space has had unfortunate and severe consequences for GridPane. While many took to Facebook and X to debate the merits of the different sides of the aisle, in many ways, we were trapped in the middle.
In December of 2024, I decided that enough was enough, that I could no longer keep my mouth shut, and that it was time that our community and the wider WordPress community hear what we believed was the correct pathway forward.
Then my lawyer told me to keep my fucking mouth shut. And I am so incredibly glad that I heeded her advice. She’s brilliant and was, of course, so incredibly right to steer me away from the fray.
Thankfully, we haven’t become embroiled in any of the myriad litigations, and I hope that continues to be true, but we definitely didn’t escape unscathed. Far from it.
It turns out that sometimes, when you take an investment from what you believe to be The Perfect Tier One investor, you can actually end up infuriating all of your other investors, without even moving a single piece on the board.
Beginning in January of this year, we started paying out almost all of our outside angel investors, many of whom had decided that this space – and our connection to it – was simply too risky (“this is downright gross,” one of them said) and they chose to exit their investment with GridPane.
In other words, they exercised their right to force us to pay back their entire investment, plus interest. This was hundreds of thousands of dollars -more than three times the amount we took from our largest outside investor.
This was not money we just had lying around, and it’s still flying out the window at a rate of tens of thousands per month. Instead of expanding our team and growing our business, we’ve been buying back our own equity. Instead of increasing the salaries of our team members, we’ve been paying other people’s lawyers.
If you had told me in September of 2024 that everything was going to become exponentially more painful than anything I’d experienced in this business up to that point, I’d have said that you were high and that such a thing couldn’t be possible.
By December, I started to have a sense of how bad The Swamp was going to get. By March, I wanted someone to just switch the entire simulation off. What doesn’t kill us… tries to kill us.
But we’re still here, we’re still standing, and we’re not going anywhere.
The silver lining is that we now own almost all of our company again, and in the near future, we’ll be able to say that we are 100% employee-owned and operated. Not that that is something traditionally lauded in businesses that aren’t a dry cleaner, but it still feels pretty cool saying it out loud.
But all of this has been an enormous distraction, and it has hamstrung us for the past 12 months.
I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish we had been able to say more and do more during this last year. I want to thank all of you for being patient. Even more than that, I want to thank each and every single person on the GridPane team AND all of the people who have continued to back us all this time: it is all going to be worth it.
The Ugly
“Here Be Dragons”
The biggest problem with building software, especially software that is not derivative in nature (AKA we’re not copying someone else), is that the map is covered almost entirely in dangerous sea monsters and question marks.
The destination is unknown.
The pathway to arrive there safely is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. There might not actually be any way to do what you want to do at all.
And all of the perils, all the dragons you’re going to have to slay between here and there, these are definitely unknown.
And all of that is true BEFORE you start adding AI and Large Language Models into the mix.
Adapting to this constant change and disruption can be a dizzying affair. Every feature, no matter how straightforward, likely has 18 different rabbit holes you’re going to have to fully explore and myriad gremlins that you’ll have to dig out before you can get anywhere near the finish line.
And, even more troubling, sometimes you arrive at the finish line only to discover that you never should have run that particular race in the first place. Sometimes you have to run five more hidden races, which no one will be able to see, before you can even start the real race.
All of which is to say: sometimes you have to completely scrap every single page of the playbook and start over. Sometimes you have to give up on a race entirely. Let’s discuss one specific example feature here at GridPane: UpdateSafely.
UpdateSafely has been completely rebuilt from the ground up four separate times now. (Many of you have only seen the first two iterations). During round three, we had completely rebuilt this tool to move its core functionality entirely off the production server so it wouldn’t burden a box that was powering live applications. Good idea, in theory.
But this rebuild used the same visual regression testing behind the scenes. This visual regression technology, while useful, has been quickly superseded by superior solutions, namely LLMs and vision models. Why send a human being a before-and-after slider, showing them a visual regression taking place, when you could have those same results assessed and summarized by an AI?
Why give everyone a brand new job when your underlying end goal is the elimination of tedious busywork? So we merrily set off and rebuilt it again, and who knows if that version will make sense after 50K repetitions and countless edge cases.
We need to build adaptability into everything we do, and UpdateSafely (and all our future releases) needs to be future-proof. They need to be highly modular and upgradeable as new model releases drop.
So that is what we work on, constantly, usually behind the scenes, in those hidden races.
The Client Portal
Due to horrifically confusing naming and versioning “PanelPress” is now formally known as the Client Portal.
This release has taken much longer than expected, but it is also much more powerful than anything we initially envisioned. In many ways, for the vast majority of our users, it will completely replace the current “nuclear reactor” dashboard (though we still have loads of work to do there, as per always).
The Client Portal will become THE go-to spot for you to point your Clients and Team members. And once fully configured for your specific needs, you may never need to log back into the current dashboard.
Some of the biggest features that I personally love are:
- The fully featured WordPress manager, allowing core, plugin, and theme management directly from the panel.
- Infinite staging – allowing for any two or more sites to be connected as production -> staging <-> development, etc. This is sadly not available anywhere else that I’m aware of, though I do believe it will become a table-stakes feature across the WP ecosystem and (fingers crossed) further out across all of hosting.
- There are completely granular team member and client permissions and asset management, which, again, is notably absent across the managed WordPress ecosystem.
- There is detailed activity logging for all aspects of the panel users’ actions.
- There is tenant-based white labelling of the panel so that your clients never need to know that GridPane even exists.
It also covers a lot of the feature requests related to the UX/UI and solves for some of the challenges that those of you with a lot of websites face, such as being able to view all the important site settings at a glance.
Feature Addons
Last year, we announced the move away from set plans towards an add-on based pricing model. Most of the work for this has been completed, and these changes will roll out to all account tiers very soon.
This won’t affect your existing plan in any way – the pricing you have will be locked in for as long as your account remains active, as it always has.
The add-ons system will make it much easier to purchase Fortress, Relay, and OCP licenses, Client accounts and sites, additional Team members, support seats, and whitelabelling in the near future.
All of the add-ons and upgrades will be available to all, but the account tier you are on will always have the best value for the feature set it contains. Existing customers always get the best of it, though we try to make it compelling for new users to jump in at any time.
Future GridPane customers will be able to get access to any and all of the features they need, but they will never get the same value as our currently available plans. (News flash, unless it wasn’t obvious: you can still sign up for Developer Plus by simply upgrading your account inside your billing portal… but this likely won’t last much longer).
Next Big Projects
The next 4 projects that we’ll be focusing on are:
- UpdateSafely
- Core dashboard UI gut/rehab
- Process Manager (required for extended API v2)
- Public Access for API v2 (Developed alongside the Client Portal)
Once the Client Portal and the new Add-ons roll out, these are the next major projects in our pipeline.
There are also copious amounts of stack overhauls and optimizations that have already been shipped to your existing servers, some of you will have noticed, and some of you likely never will notice OR need these upgrades. After we’ve added these functions into the primary UI and/or the Client Portal, we’ll release full documentation on how these things work, why they exist, and how not to burn yourself with them.
Managed Hosting for WooCommerce
We’ve had a managed hosting offering for many years now. Those of you who’ve been with us since the early days may remember this service originally being called “Apollo”.
This has evolved over the years to become one of the most in-depth hosting offerings available in the WordPress industry.
We now power some of the biggest, most complex, highest-traffic, and most insane-concurrency WooCommerce websites in the entire world. These shops now regularly scale to many thousands of checkouts per minute, with some transacting more than $1M in a single hour across tens of thousands of completed checkouts.
We help massive enterprises shrug off traffic surges that their previous hosts couldn’t begin to handle. We make it possible for companies to stop throttling their marketing spend because we can handle whatever stampede they send our way.
This service falls in what we’d call custom DevOps-level-partnership-territory that other hosts avoid (or couldn’t cater to even if they wanted to) because it’s too niche and falls outside of their very slim operating procedures.
This is also a service we now offer through Agency partnerships. For WordPress agencies that want to hand off hosting and focus on development, we offer generous commissions and work hand in hand with their lead developers as a DevOps extension of their team.
These partnerships have allowed us to grow through the challenges of the last year, and qualitatively informed our development of the platform and all of the various ways that we (and you) will interact with all of the tools we’ve built.
For any of you concerned that we’re abandoning the core mission: We built this company to allow ANYONE to provide enterprise-capable managed hosting for WordPress, regardless of scope, complexity, or budget.
We now consume these tools, our CLI/APIs, and all of this functionality as our own best customer. Which means that we’re never going to stop iterating on what these tools are capable of doing, and all of you will continue to benefit from this relentless investment.
Some of the features we have developed that we use that will be coming to the platform in the future include:
- Grafana Monitoring Servers
- Log Aggregation Servers
- Multiple System/Shell Users per sites (already in general availability)
That’s a wrap!
We have a mountain of additional feature-specific and technical updates that we’ve omitted from this post because this guy is already fairly long, so keep an eye out for that in the next couple of weeks.
Be on the lookout for a handful of additional updates from Steve and myself between now and the end of the year.
If, like us, you’re monitoring countless Black Friday/Cyber Monday launches over the next, I wish you the very best of luck! Have a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving if you’re celebrating and a great week if you’re not!
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