These days, everything half-decent or functional has a subscription problem.
Every tool, every feature, every tiny bit of functionality comes wrapped in a monthly fee attached to a platform you’ll use for maybe 10% of what it offers. Want to lock content behind an email form? That’ll be €15 a month. Want a timeline on your page? Better subscribe to a page builder. Want to showcase your projects in a card grid? Here’s your annual plan.
I got tired of it. So I built my own.
Three plugins, one-time payment, no fluff
Over the past few weeks I’ve been building and testing three standalone WordPress plugins that each do exactly one thing well.
Content Locker gates any section of your page behind an email form. Drop it in as a Gutenberg block, collect leads, grow your list. The free version is a soft lock, good enough for most use cases. The Pro version gates actual file downloads with a secure server-side delivery system, meaning the file URL never touches the browser until after a valid email submission.
Project Cards lets you showcase projects, products or team members as a clean card grid with popup descriptions. Build a reusable tag library, organise cards into categories, and place them anywhere with a shortcode.
Timeline Block renders a scroll-animated vertical timeline directly in Gutenberg. Dates, titles, descriptions, icons, fully customisable colours, and it animates in as visitors scroll down the page.
All three are available on my Gumroad page. One-time payment. Yours to keep.
Why I build these
Standalone plugins are so much cheaper and easier than paying a subscription for a service where you will never touch 90% of its functionality. That frustration is where this started.
But there is more to it. These plugins fit into a way of thinking I keep coming back to: create, test, try out, implement, analyse and reiterate. Building them is how I test my own vibe-coding knowledge and sharpen how I think about problems. Sharing them is part of that process too. If something I built saves someone else the same headache I had, that is a good outcome.
Stay in the loop
I plan to keep building. More plugins, improvements to existing ones, and new ideas as they come up.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to updates directly on my Gumroad page. You will hear about new releases and updates when something new drops, nothing else.
Find all three plugins at itisleon.gumroad.com