About

Build once.Touch less.Last longer.

Ounce Works makes very small WordPress plugins for commerce shops. No investors, no roadmap written to impress anyone, and no plan to become large.

OUNCEWorks

the smallest thing that fixes the biggest thing.

The name

An ounce is the smallest unit anyone actually weighs with.

Sixteen of them make a pound. Put one on the long end of a lever and it will lift the other fifteen — not because it got bigger, but because it was placed where the leverage was.

That is the whole argument of this company, and it is why the slogan is built by the ounce, felt by the pound. The size of the thing you install has nothing to do with the size of the thing it moves.

Ounce is what you call the products. Ounce Works is what you call the company — works in the sense of ironworks or waterworks: the place the thing is made.

Why small comes first

We make it lightfewer promises to keep
so it works on installnothing to configure or read
so it is still here in ten yearssmall enough to carry

These are not three values. They are one chain, and it only runs downhill. Light is the cause; lasting is the effect.

How we work

Three operating principles.

Weight is a cost, not a feature

Every feature is a promise you owe for as long as the product exists. There is a hard limit on how many can be owed. So the question we ask is never "could we add this?" but "what would we have to stop maintaining to afford it?" Most of the time the honest answer is: this is somebody else’s plugin.

The first five minutes are the product

If software needs a setup guide, the guide is a bill for work we failed to do. Our target is zero configuration screens: install it, and the thing it promises is already true. That target is also a discipline — it is impossible to hit while the plugin is doing five jobs.

Only promise what can actually be kept

Small vendors do not usually die from bad code. They die from having promised more than a single pair of hands could carry, and then going quiet. We would rather be visibly small and still here in 2036 than impressively broad and gone by 2028.

What we stand for

Four promises that do not move.

These are the long versions. They are not marketing positions we can revisit when revenue is slow — every one of them is a door we deliberately welded shut.

The free version is not a trap

The plugin in the WordPress.org directory does the entire job on your own server: no product cap, no monthly send cap, no thirty-day clock, and no premium code sitting inside it waiting for a licence key. If it works for you and you never pay us a cent, that is a success, not a leak.

A crippled free tier is a marketing tactic that costs the user their time and us their trust. It is also, as it happens, against the directory’s own rules — which tells you the ecosystem already worked this out.

We do not sell lifetime licences

Not at any price, not as a launch promotion, not for a friend. A lifetime licence charges today’s customer for a service funded by tomorrow’s — which works right up until tomorrow’s customer stops arriving, and then support quietly stops.

A yearly renewal is the honest version of "we will still be here". It is the only price that pays for the maintenance it implies.

You get an answer

Every question gets an answer within one working day, from the person who wrote the code — which means an answer is usually also a fix. That is a floor, not a schedule: most days it is much faster.

It is deliberately set at a level a side-job week keeps one hundred per cent of the time. A support promise you miss is worse than a modest one you never miss, and there is a weekly ceiling on the hours on purpose — when support runs past it the correct response is not to hire, it is to go and fix whatever is generating the questions.

Your list is yours

Shopper email addresses live in your WooCommerce database, exportable at any time. When the paid add-on sends on your behalf we process an address to deliver that one message, keep a delivery record so you can prove what happened, and do nothing else with it.

No resale, no profiling, no matching across shops, no "anonymised insights" product. A data processing agreement is available before you buy, not after you ask twice.

How the next plugin gets chosen

Four gates. An idea has to pass all of them.

Twenty-nine ideas were examined and twenty-nine were rejected before this company built anything. These are the filters that did the rejecting.

It has to be a moment, not a category We build for a specific thing that happens on a specific day — a shopper hitting a sold-out page — not for "inventory management".
It has to remove friction, not add capability Ten per cent better than an incumbent is not a reason to switch. Removing a step someone repeats every week is.
The shop has to already make money from it We only work next to a pipe that already has money flowing through it. We are not in the business of proving a market exists.
One pair of hands has to be able to keep it alive If the honest maintenance estimate does not fit inside a side-project week, the idea is rejected — however good it is.

There is a fifth rule that only applies to us: nothing new begins until the current plugin has twenty paying shops. It is the difference between a company and a collection of abandoned repositories.

How the money works

Plainly, because you are trusting a stranger.

The plugin in the WordPress.org directory is free and always will be. The paid add-on is a yearly subscription that pays for servers that send email, and for the time of the person who keeps all of it working.

There is no outside money, so there is no growth target set by anyone else, and no quarter in which the incentives suddenly change. The company is profitable at a size most people would consider a rounding error — which is exactly the point.

Payments are handled by Polar as merchant of record, so invoicing and tax are handled properly for shops in the EU, UK and elsewhere.

The person

Jerry Kang

Founder & sole developer

I have built WordPress sites and wired plugins into them for years, which means I have been on the receiving end of a plugin that quietly stopped sending mail. This company exists because that specific failure is fixable and almost nobody has bothered.

jerry@ounceworks.com — every question gets an answer from me within one working day.

Be told when it ships

One email when the free plugin lands on WordPress.org, and one when the paid add-on opens. Nothing else, ever.

No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe link in every message. See the privacy note.