WP Engine purchases Delicious Brains WordPress Plugins (& ACF)

bigredseo

HD Community Advisor
Staff member
Big news this week with WP Engine acquiring Delicious Brains and their arsenal of plugins including the very popular ACF Pro (Advanced Custom Fields).

Delicious Brains acquired ACF on June 1st 2021, and here we are 1 year and 1 day later (June 2nd 2022) and Delicious Brains has been purchased by WP Engine. If one didn't know better, one could assume that there was a form of contract in place to prevent the sale of ACF for a period of 1 year.

Delicious Brains had various other plugins too - WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, Better Search Replace, WP Offload SES, and SpinupWP.

As part of the sale, SpinupWP will not be sold and will remain it's own entity.

This is big news as ACF Pro is used by so many people, but WP Engine did announce that they plan to retain the same Lifetime License agreement to those that purchased the plugin prior to 2020 (when ACF Changed their pricing structure).

Time will tell what WP Engine does with the new plugins and if they'll kill off the WP Migrate in favor of their own plugin that they have on hand. WP Engine also owns Genesis Theme (previously owned by StudioPress) and Local, an easy method to create Wordpress sites locally prior to uploading to servers.

No information on what the pricing structure for this deal looked like, but congratulations to all parties involved in what was a big decision on both ends!
 
What do you think will be the pros and cons of this?
The PRO is that WP Engine is a fairly big group and will have more money and resources to continue development.

The CON is that WP Engine has its own product line too, so this could become like JetPack where multiple scripts are combined into one GIANT script where someone really only needs 1 small portion of it.

JetPack is a great example. It has some great features, but it's 6 or 7 scripts that you are forced into even though we have other scripts that operate better for our particular needs.

The other CON is that it could position WP Engine to be that much tastier to be acquired
 
I think a lot of the time these kind of acquisitions are a BAD thing, but in this case I'm pretty confident that there are not going to be any negative changes to any of these plugins in the short term at least.

The post from Brad Touesnard (Delicious Brains founder and CEO) blog post makes it pretty clear that this was a well thought out move and more importantly that the key developers of ACF and the other plugins will be continuing to work with them after the acquisition, including Iain Poulson moving over to WP Engine and overseeing them.

 

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