I want to talk about something bigger than a broken dashboard and jacked up migration.
What happened with Kadence and Liquid Web this week was a migration that went badly. The execution failed, the communication was absent, and thousands of users spent two days unable to access licenses they had already paid for. All of that is documented and worth discussing.
But underneath the chaos was a question that the WordPress community dances around and never quite answers directly: when you buy a lifetime deal, what exactly are you buying?
And when the company sells, does the new owner have to honor it?
In this post:
- The full two-day recap of what happened with Kadence
- What Kadence’s own marketing director said publicly on launch day
- What the community said, and why it matters
- The honest legal and ethical reality of lifetime deals
- Why Divi’s 17-year track record means something, and what it actually proves
- What web professionals need to understand before buying any LTD
The Two-Day Recap
On the morning of May 12, Kadence users logged in and found their portal gone. KadenceWP.com redirected to Liquid Web. Lifetime license holders saw “You don’t own any products yet.” Some were being prompted to purchase licenses they already owned. Documentation was buried inside a massive corporate domain. The familiar forum, gone.
No advance email with a specific date. No instructions waiting at the new portal. No pinned post in the community group before the switch went live. Just a redirect and a very polished blog post full of reassurances that switching was optional.
Support tickets spiked immediately.
The first official response appeared in comment threads, not as a pinned announcement. It told users to open support tickets. Someone replied: “You want me to open a support ticket? You’re going to have to process thousands of support tickets because of this migration.”
Then something unusual happened. Katy Boykin, Kadence’s previous Director of Marketing, posted a YouTube Short titled “I’m pissed about the KadenceWP/Liquidweb rebrand.” Her description: “This is a nightmare. Can I wake up from the terrible dream now?”
Katy was not an outside critic. She was not a disgruntled customer. She was the person whose job it was to market Kadence to the world. She had been a passionate user before she ever worked there. She spoke at Kadence Amplify. She hosted the Kadence Beat podcast. She built her own client sites on the platform.
When the person whose job it was to make Kadence look good wakes up on launch day and calls it a nightmare before 8am, the gap between how this was planned internally and how it actually landed becomes impossible to ignore.
Lauren Dierschke, a fellow web professional with nearly two decades in the WordPress space who has personally served over 30,000 customers, had made a post in March asking for communication and answers. By May 12, that post had 170 comments. 170 people showing up, waiting, asking questions. To that point: complete silence from Liquid Web.
Her public statement was direct. She said it was clear Liquid Web had no idea what they were doing, and more importantly, no common decency, respect, or integrity for this product or the customers behind it. Her closing: “We are not just users. We are business owners whose livelihoods depend on tools like this. You owe this community and your customers a REAL response.“
224 likes. 144 comments.
By day two, the fixes came. A 2am GMT fix for login failures. A 6am fix for lifetime customers whose orders weren’t showing. A 12:45pm fix for full bundle customers. An actual status post with specific timestamps, clear instructions, and a plain answer about what happened. The kind of communication that should have been written before the switch was ever flipped.
Then the Uncomfortable Conversation Started
Ben Meredith, a lifetime license holder and former Head of Support for multiple Liquid Web brands including Kadence, weighed in. His post acknowledged the chaos and offered some grace to the support team absorbing thousands of tickets they didn’t create.
But he also made a point that deserves a direct response.
His argument, summarized: lifetime license holders who expect a company to keep giving them more and more features forever for an $800 one-time payment are dealing with a “you-problem.” They’re still getting everything they paid for at the time. The company is still delivering on the original deal.
He is not entirely wrong about the support behavior argument. Support agents did not design this rollout, and nobody should be abusive toward people trying to fix it.
But on the lifetime deal question, I think he’s framing it too narrowly. And it leads into the bigger conversation this situation actually opened up.
What Are You Actually Buying With a Lifetime Deal?
Let’s be direct about what a lifetime deal is, because the industry has spent years being intentionally vague about it.
When you pay $399 or $800 or $999 for “lifetime access” to a software product, you are not buying a perpetual license to a fixed piece of software. You are buying ongoing access to a living product, including updates, security patches, and continued functionality, for as long as that product exists, in exchange for a single upfront payment.
That is the promise. That is what makes the price make sense. If you were just buying a frozen version of the software as it existed on the day of purchase, the pitch would say that. It never does.
The company takes a calculated risk. They get your cash now, before they’ve earned it through recurring payments. You get access for the long run without annual renewal fees. Both sides are making a bet.
The company is betting they’ll keep enough annual subscribers to fund ongoing development. You are betting the product will still exist and still be maintained long enough that the lifetime deal pays off versus paying annually.
That bet comes with real risk for the buyer. And most buyers know it at some level. But the risk they’re accepting is “this company might not survive” or “the product might not keep up with the market.” Not “the company will sell to a larger company and the new owner will decide my lifetime deal no longer includes tools they acquired after I bought in.”
That last scenario is a different kind of risk. And it’s one that almost nobody discloses at the point of sale.
The Legal Reality Nobody Talks About
Here is what actually happens to contracts when a company is acquired, stated as plainly as possible.
Contracts are generally assignable. When Liquid Web acquired the StellarWP portfolio, they inherited the rights and obligations under existing customer agreements. That includes lifetime deals. The general legal principle is that the acquiring company steps into the shoes of the original company and is bound by its contracts.
That is the principle. The practice is messier.
What Liquid Web actually confirmed is that existing lifetime licenses cover Kadence products as they existed at the time of purchase. The tools added through the consolidation, specifically Solid Security from SolidWP, the WooCommerce tools from IconicWP, and the membership features from Restrict Content Pro, are not included because they were not part of the Kadence suite when the lifetime deals were sold.
That position is legally defensible. Those products were acquired separately, under separate commercial arrangements, and were never part of what a Kadence lifetime deal buyer actually purchased.
The problem is that Liquid Web did not say this clearly on day one. They said “your licenses and purchases are safe” and “nothing has changed for existing customers.” Both of those statements are true in a narrow sense and deeply misleading in practice when a user logs in and gets an upgrade prompt.
If you’re going to make a legal argument about what lifetime deals do and don’t cover, make it on day one. Don’t let users spend 48 hours wondering whether their investment is intact and then clarify in the comments of a community post.
Why Divi Matters in This Conversation
I’ve been a Divi lifetime license holder for 16 years. Even though I long ago deserted Divi as a development tool, they never deserted me. I still get everything. Divi 5, new features, continued updates, support. Elegant Themes just celebrated their 17th anniversary, and the lifetime deal is still honored and still being sold.
Elegant Themes has never been acquired by a larger company. They are independently owned. That independence is not incidental to their track record. It is the reason for it.
When a founder owns the company and made the original lifetime deal promise personally, the incentive to honor it is clear. Your reputation is on the line. Your community built itself around that trust. The promise and the person making it are the same entity.
When a private equity-backed hosting conglomerate acquires a portfolio of software products, the relationship between the promise and the entity honoring it becomes much more complicated. The people who sold you the lifetime deal are gone or in different roles. The incentives have changed. The customer base is now a line item in a spreadsheet, not a community the founders know by name.
Elegant Themes surviving 17 years with a clean track record on lifetime deals is admirable. But it should not be used as evidence that lifetime deals are safe across the board. Elegant Themes surviving is evidence that Elegant Themes has good values and a sustainable business model. It tells you nothing about what happens to your lifetime deal when the company that sold it to you gets absorbed into a hosting conglomerate.
What This Means for Anyone Considering an LTD
Lifetime deals made by independently owned companies with strong communities and clean track records are a different product than lifetime deals made by venture-backed companies that may be positioning for an exit.
You cannot always tell which one you’re looking at on the day you buy.
What you can do is ask some questions before you hand over the one-time fee.
Who owns this company right now? If the answer involves private equity or a parent company, your lifetime deal has more layers of risk than one sold by a founder-owned business.
Has the company taken outside investment? Investment capital eventually needs a return. One common way to generate that return is an acquisition. Acquisitions complicate lifetime deal obligations.
What does the terms of service actually say? Most lifetime deal terms are vague. “Lifetime access” is rarely defined. Very few specify what happens in the event of an acquisition or product discontinuation. That vagueness benefits the company, not you.
Does the lifetime deal include future products, or only the product as it exists today? Kadence’s current position, that the lifetime deal covers the original Kadence suite and not products added through later acquisitions, is actually a reasonable interpretation of a reasonable contract. The problem is that no one explained that clearly at the point of sale, or at any point during the five years between the acquisition and this migration.
Would you still use this product if it stopped receiving major updates? Because that is the actual floor of what “lifetime access” guarantees. The product runs. Security patches continue for a defined period. Major feature development is not contractually promised by most lifetime deals.
What the Kadence Situation Actually Teaches Us
The chaos of the first 48 hours was a communication failure. The fixes came. The product is still running. For most users, the unified portal will probably turn out to be more convenient than what came before.
But the trust question will take longer to resolve.
Liquid Web inherited a community that had been built on a foundation of direct, personal relationships between users and a founder-led team. Ben Ritner built Kadence in Missoula, Montana. The early community knew the names of the people making the product. That is a different thing from being a line item in the software portfolio of a managed hosting company.
The Kadence product may continue to be excellent. The team still building it appears to care about it. The consolidation may genuinely produce a better, more financially stable platform in the long run.
None of that undoes the fact that the people who bet on Kadence early, who paid for lifetime deals when the company needed early cash to grow, who built businesses on the platform and recommended it to clients, deserved better than finding out about the migration by logging in and seeing an upgrade button where their licenses used to be.
That is not entitlement. That is the minimum standard of respect that a community of loyal customers earns.
A Note on Tools You Depend On
I have said this to clients for nearly 20 years and I will keep saying it.
Own your domain. Own your hosting. Own your files. Document your licenses somewhere you control, not just inside a vendor’s portal.
And when you consider buying a lifetime deal for any tool you plan to build a business on, ask who owns the company making the promise, whether that ownership is likely to change, and what the terms actually say about what happens if it does.
Lifetime deals are not inherently bad. But “lifetime” means the lifetime of the product, under the ownership of whoever holds it when the day comes to make good on that promise. Sometimes that is the founder who sold it to you. Sometimes it is a managed hosting conglomerate in the middle of a portfolio consolidation.
Know which one you’re dealing with before you buy.
Where Things Stand for Kadence Users Right Now
Log in at software.liquidweb.com. Use your existing email. Use “Sign in with a code” if no password reset arrived.
Your existing licenses are valid. Your tools on live sites are still running. The “You don’t own any products yet” message was a display error that has been fixed.
If your licenses still are not showing, open a support ticket at software.liquidweb.com/support with your original purchase email and any order confirmation numbers.
Lifetime deal holders: your license covers Kadence products as they existed at the time of purchase. SolidWP security tools, IconicWP WooCommerce features, and Restrict Content Pro were not part of the original Kadence suite and require a new plan to access.
Excellent Writeup. I’m Ben Meredith, quoted in the article.
I completely agree that my framing was too narrow, and too blunt.
I should clarify that (were I still there and had any say in things) I would have fought tooth and nail to *not* put the name “Kadence” on anything that wasn’t subsequently going to be grandfathered into the lifetime plans. The spirit of the agreement matters, and the current leadership has shown that they are not in agreement with that spirit.
Legal defensibility aside, I think they’ve shown me enough to not make any part of my business depend on them keeping their word.
What is a “you problem” (or a me-problem to be more specific) is that I need to realize that Lifetime deals are not made in a vacuum or in the midst of an unchanging landscape. When I entered into that agreement, it was within a reality that simply does not exist any longer (because the other party in the agreement burned it to the ground).
I no longer want to have a lifetime deal with them. And I don’t think anyone else should either. So the bluntness of my reaction was a poorly-veneered veil of what I actually wanted: for LTD license-holders to not waste their time trying to have a lifetime deal with a company that just demonstrated it doesn’t respect them.
Thank you for commenting on this…I think it’s important that people know the truth of the situation. I feel badly for you and anyone else that has made an agreement with Liquidweb. I’m not mad at any developers or owners who made the decision to sell in good faith – how were any of you to know how badly they would handl this? Regardless, I’m not ready to jump ship because in my mind, Kadence is STILL a superior product… how long that lasts is to be seen.
I agree with your assessments about LTD’s…I think as a community, developers just expect people to keep their word. On a personal note – I should also say that I’m gutted for our community and appreciate the fact that you’re willing to come back and discuss things (even when you’re not presented in the best light!) Again, I don’t fault you – the fault lies with Liquidweb.
Good Article.
You wrote: “The problem is that Liquid Web did not say this clearly on day one. They said: ‘Your licenses and purchases are safe’ and ‘nothing has changed for existing customers.'”
I believe the problem goes far beyond that.
The real issue is that Kadence clearly and explicitly promised all customers on the Ultimate Plan: “Access to all current & future products”. And for the Ultimate Lifetime Plan, it was stated in bold: “Get every product in our full plan: one payment, lifetime support, updates, and all future products.” Kadence guaranteed this to all buyers right up until the transition. “All future products” – and “ALL” is a very unambiguous word.
I understand the argument that these newly integrated plugins were not part of the suite at the time of purchase. However, as buyers, we specifically purchased that peace of mind and long-term security. If Liquid Web now claims this promise is worthless, that simply cannot be right. Because ultimately, we must state very clearly: Liquid Web made a conscious, strategic decision. They did not create a brand-new product; instead, they chose to expand an already successful product with an excellent reputation. And the decision of these very people is now supposed to mean that the contractual guarantee of “all future products” suddenly has no value?
I do not believe this is what was contractually guaranteed to the buyers. Instead, we are already reading that there might soon be features or products that cannot be used at all under a legacy license. In the end, we are left without a fully functional license because the developers are creating tools that make using the old Kadence version increasingly difficult. In my eyes, this is an artificial separation. There are either two types of customers or two types of Kadence themes. But there is only one Kadence, and that is exactly what the customers paid for.
As a customer, you no longer feel valued. You are demoted to a “Legacy customer” with a “Legacy Kadence”. This feels absolutely nothing like the promise we received from Kadence: “Get every product in our full plan: one payment, lifetime support, updates, and all future products.”
And yes, you are absolutely right: “We are business owners whose livelihoods depend on these tools.” We have our own clients to whom we recommended and implemented Kadence with its promised full range of features.
I firmly believe that “Access to ALL current & FUTURE products” is an unmistakable commitment to the buyers of an Ultimate license. Therefore, the only right path is to treat old and new customers equally and migrate existing customers to the new unified plans. No “Legacy” status with constant uncertainty, but one unified Kadence for everyone. After all, there is only one Kadence, and if you paid for it, you should get that exact Kadence.
For this reason, Kadence Ultimate customers must be transitioned to Elite status. Yes, we are fortunate to hold these older contracts, and we should benefit from them as long as our businesses run. New customers must sign up for the new tiers, and Liquid Web is more than welcome to generate their revenue there. But you do not treat loyal, existing customers this way. After all, they are the ones who made Kadence what it is today. Under these conditions, I doubt any freelancer or agency can still recommend Kadence to their clients with a clear conscience.
I agree that all lifetime license holders should receive all updates…that is what was promised when Ben sold the company, and I believe in my heart he thought it would be honored. But when a smaller company is absorbed into a larger company, are they legally bound to the same terms? That’s my question for the community at large. I believe they should be, and will be severely disappointed if they aren’t.
The biggest frustration for me is that if I want to purchase one of the other plugins, it can’t just be added to my existing subscription because it’s a “new” product. The whole thing is a mess. I am unsure how it’s going to play out, and as a business owner who depends on this product, it’s a bit disconcerting.
“But when a smaller company is acquired by a larger one, are they legally bound by the same terms and conditions?”
a) Yes, I believe so—because the acquiring company takes over the existing contracts, and with them, the promises made.
and
b) We may need to consider how long ago Kadence was sold. Prior to the transition to Liquid Web, the following guarantee was still in place:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260415180559/https://www.kadencewp.com/pricing/
This was explicitly listed as a key feature within the Ultimate Plan: “Access to all current & future products.”
If Kadence customers are denied full access to the Kadence ecosystem, there is a risk that the original contracts and promises could be gradually—and significantly—eroded to the point where an “upgrade” becomes mandatory. However, if a customer was originally promised “Lifetime” access, the concept of an “upgrade” simply cannot apply.
Ultimate customers would effectively be forced to become Elite customers. They require the assurance that their products will continue to function fully and without restriction for as long as they choose to use them. If Liquid Web fails to uphold this guarantee, it undermines the very foundation upon which Kadence was built: the trust placed in a product marketed as a “hassle-free” solution.
I hope there are other Kadence customers who share this view—insisting that no such distinctions should be made—and who are prepared to take legal action if necessary. After all, these business owners have passed this very promise on to their own web design clients. If Liquid Web reneges on this promise, these business owners will lose credibility with their own clientele—creating a ripple effect of frustration and resentment. And who, at that point, would still want to use Kadence?