Unstale AI, a licence for a WordPress plugin that rewrites and republishes old posts · Updated October 8, 2026

A licence for a plugin, not a subscription to a service

What unstale.ai sells is a licence, not access to a hosted service. The free plugin is published on wordpress.org under the slug unstale, and Unstale Pro is the paid add-on; the terms state that both are licensed under the GPL, version 2 or later, with the Pro licence controlling access to updates, support and the licence service rather than rights over the code. The work happens inside the customer's own WordPress install: the customer connects an Anthropic, OpenAI or Google provider under Settings then Connectors, and the pricing page and the privacy policy both state that WordPress holds the credentials, that the plugin stores no key of its own, and that content travels from the customer's server straight to the provider without passing through unstale.ai servers.

The home page presents one slider with four refresh levels, two free and two paid. Minimal covers typos, a fact-check of figures and dates, internal links and the removal of em dashes; Balanced adds live web research, meta tags, JSON-LD, key-takeaway boxes and readability work. Strong and Maximal are the Pro levels: the first adds persona copy, a TL;DR, calls to action and a quiz, the second rebuilds the outline from the sources it finds. The refresh is published as six numbered steps, Analyse, Research, Rewrite, Enrich, Link with up to 15 internal links, then Publish, and the page states that each step is a separate background job and that a step which times out is retried.

Every rewrite lands in a review queue with a side-by-side diff. The pricing FAQ states that automatic publishing exists and is off by default, that a refresh never moves the URL or the slug, that the previous version is kept as a WordPress revision, and that Restore brings it back as long as the post has not been edited since. Batch sizes are published: up to 50 posts per batch from the content health screen on the free plugin, up to 100 on Pro. Paid tiers carry the same feature list and differ only by the number of sites, adding the two Pro levels, scheduled automation, per-category rules, a custom instruction for a refresh launched from the editor or from an AI agent, and priority email support. On wordpress.org on 8 October 2026 the free plugin showed version 1.37.1, 100+ active installations, 4,423 cumulative downloads since 2 August 2026, zero ratings and zero support threads. Nothing was installed for this page, so every statement about what the plugin does is the publisher's description.

The grid on 8 October 2026, and two tabs that share the same numbers

Prices were read on 8 October 2026, in USD. The page loads on its annual tab: free at 0, 1 site at 59 a year, 5 sites at 149 a year, Unlimited at 299 a year with the line "Subscription only. No unlimited LTD, ever." A second tab, labelled Founder LTD and dated "Window: until October 31, 2026", shows 149 as a one-time payment for 1 site and 349 one-time for 5 sites, while the Unlimited tier keeps its 299 a year. Two numbers therefore appear twice on the same page: 149 is both the 5-site annual price and the 1-site lifetime price, and 299 is both the annual and the founder price of the Unlimited tier. The terms call that Founder deal a one-time payment for a licence valid for the lifetime of the product.

Payment runs through Paddle. The terms state that Paddle is the seller of record for every purchase, runs the checkout, charges the payment method, handles VAT and sales tax, issues the invoice and localises the amount at checkout. The pricing page carries a live Paddle client token, the attribute data-paddle-environment set to live, and five Paddle price identifiers. Before the checkout opens, a separate box that is not pre-ticked asks for express consent to immediate delivery and acknowledgement that the 14-day right of withdrawal is lost once delivery has begun; the page states it must be ticked to reach the checkout, the privacy policy gives the wording version as 2026-10-07.1, and the terms cite Article 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU and Article L221-28, 13 of the French Consumer Code. How Paddle displays tax for a given country was not checked, since no checkout was opened.

The refund page, dated "Last updated: July 19, 2026", promises a 14-day money-back guarantee on the three paid plans and on the Founder lifetime deal, described as no questions asked. A request goes by email with the order reference or licence key; the page states requests are usually processed within 2 business days and that Paddle issues the refund to the original payment method, typically appearing within 5 to 10 business days. A renewal charge is refundable within 14 days of the renewal date; past that, the page states no refund is issued and the licence keeps working to the end of the paid period. Usage billed by the customer's own AI provider is never refundable, the page adds, because that provider bills the customer directly. There is no free trial: the free tier is permanent, so the 14 days here is the refund window and the withdrawal period, not a trial length.

Twenty-five pages, a 126-entry changelog and a public model catalogue

The sitemap lists exactly 25 URLs, carries priority values but no lastmod, and all 25 answered 200 on 8 October 2026. Three pages live outside it: /cookies/, /llms.txt at 6,513 bytes, and /checkout/success/, which carries a noindex tag and which the sitemap's own source comment says is left out deliberately as a post-purchase page. robots.txt holds a single Sitemap line. The site is not itself WordPress: /wp-json/wp/v2/posts and /wp-login.php both return 404, there is no feed, and the sitemap comment describes a static site with no build step.

Without any account a visitor reaches the home page, the pricing page, a cost calculator, one documentation page of 56,118 bytes with 30 headings, a changelog of 126 dated entries running from 2 August 2026 to 7 October 2026 and weighing 110,377 bytes, a guides index listing 11 articles under six headings, three pages comparing or reviewing competing plugins, the affiliate page and the legal pages. The documentation states "No account needed to read any of this." Those three comparison pages are the publisher's own writing about named competitors and carry reading dates of 30 September 2026 and 24 September 2026. For demonstration there is one self-hosted 30-second video on the home page, three documentation videos that load from YouTube only after a click, and seven captioned screenshots on the wordpress.org listing. There is no interactive demo, no sandbox and no public dashboard.

The site also exposes a public, unauthenticated endpoint at /api/v1/models.json, 3,994 bytes on 8 October 2026 with an "updated" field of 2026-10-05, listing seven models from the three providers with per-million-token prices, three shown and four flagged hidden. The terms state the catalogue is free and as is, with no uptime commitment, and that its prices are indicative and come from the providers. The cost examples are framed the same way: the pricing page shows an "Example estimate" of 0.09 dollars for a Balanced refresh of an article of about 1,200 words on one model and 0.81 on two others, and 0.02 to 0.14 at Minimal, with token counts it says are calibrated on pipeline runs dated 11 July 2026 and 21 August 2026. The home page slider goes further, displaying at 120 posts a month an API bill of 97 dollars against a "Freelance equivalent" of 14,400 dollars at a stated 120 dollars per post. Those are the page's own arithmetic on its own assumptions, labelled an example estimate; nothing here measures them.

Thirty percent recurring, and one cookie that only lands after a click

An affiliate program exists, on the subdomain affiliates.unstale.ai, which answered 200 on 8 October 2026 and set a partners_portal session cookie. The public page states 30 percent of what each referred customer pays, before tax and after discounts, recurring on every annual renewal, and spells out the yearly amounts: 17.70 dollars on the 1 site plan, 44.70 on 5 sites, 89.70 on Unlimited. Its slider calculator carries the label "An estimate, not a promise". The program terms, thirteen numbered clauses plus a FAQ, add a 60-day referral cookie, a 30-day hold before a commission becomes payable, a payout floor of 50 USD a month, payment by ACH or PayPal, and the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The code doubles as a coupon giving buyers 10 percent off, and a code found on a coupon aggregator or deal site is archived and stops attributing sales. The rules prohibit self-purchases, brand bidding in paid search and setting the cookie without a real visit. No application was submitted here, and the number of partners is not published.

The referral cookie is consent-gated, and that can be checked from outside. On 8 October 2026 a request to the home page with a ?ref= parameter returned no Set-Cookie header at all, while the HTML grew from 27,344 to 28,650 bytes and gained a server-rendered consent banner that the plain home page does not contain. The banner names the cookie aff_ref, its 60-day life and the affiliate service partners.licenseos.net, described as run by Web & SEO Ltd, and states that refusing or ignoring it sets and sends nothing. The cookie page states aff_ref is the only cookie this site sets, and the privacy policy describes it as HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, then describes the counting pixel: after an Accept click the browser loads a 1x1 image from partners.licenseos.net which counts a visit once a day using a daily pseudonymous fingerprint of the IP address, an HMAC of the address and the date, rather than the address itself.

On its own outbound links the site carries no referral apparatus. A parameter search across 238 external link instances on 18 pages, resolving to 124 distinct URLs, matched only the site's own affiliate page and its links to the partner portal. The only rel value found on anchors was noopener, nine times, with no nofollow and no sponsored. Of the 124 URLs, 120 returned 200, and the four others were refusals of automated requests rather than broken targets.

Web & SEO Ltd in Hong Kong: legal notice, a register behind a login, and what cannot be checked

Every page footer names the publisher: Web & SEO Ltd, Kowloon, Hong Kong, company no. 1826120, linked to webandseo.dev, whose legal notice of 2 September 2026 repeats the number, names Maximilien Labadie as publication director and gives Hong Kong law as applicable. The official register could not be read: the Hong Kong Companies Registry e-services and its Cyber Search Centre both gate search behind an account. OpenCorporates, read on 8 October 2026, holds a record for number 1826120 under the name WEB & SEO LIMITED, status Live, private company limited by shares, with the incorporation date behind a login; a search for the same number elsewhere returned nothing, so no incorporation date and no officer list is established here.

The domain is new: WHOIS gives 4 July 2026 as its creation date and Cloudflare as registrar, with registrant details redacted. From outside, unstale.ai resolves to Cloudflare addresses and an unknown path returns the default nginx 404 page; where the site is really hosted is not observable, and the Hetzner Online GmbH declaration in that legal notice covers webandseo.dev, not this domain.

On data, the privacy policy states the free plugin's only call home is an unauthenticated fetch of the model catalogue every 24 hours, carrying no content, no credentials, no licence key and no site identifier; the Pro add-on sends the licence key, site URL and plugin version, with a 14-day grace period if validation fails. Published retention is 14 days for access logs, and 7 years after a licence lapses for the email, transaction reference, licence key and activation records. The only analytics is Cloudflare Web Analytics, loaded by the site's own script, which skips its beacon on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.

Outside the publisher's own properties, traces are few. The Wayback Machine holds four captures of anything on unstale.ai, none of the home page, so earlier wording and earlier prices cannot be compared, and searches on 8 October 2026 returned no press coverage, no Product Hunt page and no independent review. The Trustpilot profile that surfaces belongs to Académie Web & SEO at webandseo.fr, 4.8 out of 5 from 47 reviews, latest review 30 October 2024, none mentioning Unstale; an author block on six unstale.ai pages cites that figure as one about the publisher. The site publishes no customer, revenue or partner count, no status page and no telephone number: contact runs through three generic mailboxes on its own domain.