About Haychdev

Haychdev builds lightweight, privacy-first WordPress plugins. The guiding principle is simple: your data should stay in your own database, not on someone else's servers. Every plugin is built to be fast, dependency-light, and respectful of your visitors — no cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party trackers, and no outbound calls from the free builds.

In practice, “privacy-first” means something concrete on every plugin. A heatmap that stores click and scroll data in your own tables instead of streaming it to a hosted dashboard. A form builder that encrypts submissions at rest and sends notifications through your own mailer. A consent tool that blocks third-party scripts locally and sets no cookies of its own. An activity log that records who changed what, entirely on your site. If a feature can be done locally, it is — and on the rare occasion something genuinely needs an external service, it is documented and opt-in.

Every Haychdev plugin ships as a fully-functional, license-free core on the WordPress.org directory, plus an optional paid Pro add-on for teams that want more. The free version is never crippled to upsell the paid one — it works completely on its own, and the Pro add-on is a separate plugin that adds features through extension points the free core exposes. All code is GPLv2-or-later and open source; each plugin's source lives in its own repository under the haych-dev organization on GitHub.

The suite currently spans seven plugins — heatmaps, forms, media library folders, taxonomy management, cookie consent, security hardening, and audit logging — each built to the same standard: self-hosted, no outbound calls in the free build, and compliant with the WordPress.org plugin guidelines.

That “no outbound calls” rule is deliberate, and it has practical consequences. When a plugin never sends visitor data to a third party, you avoid adding another data processor to your privacy policy, you sidestep a whole class of consent-banner obligations, and there is no external service that can change its terms, raise its price, or disappear and take your data with it. The data lives in your database under your control, and uninstalling a plugin removes its tables cleanly — nothing is left behind on someone else's servers because nothing was ever sent there.

The free-plus-Pro model exists for the same reason. Hosting the free core on WordPress.org keeps it honest: it has to be genuinely useful on its own, with no locked features or trial timers, because those are not allowed in the directory. The Pro add-on is then a clean, separate purchase for people who want the advanced features — not a paywall bolted onto a deliberately hobbled free version. You can run the free plugins forever and never hit a wall designed to push you toward paying.

Haychdev is built and maintained by Michael Freeman, a WordPress developer focused on performance and privacy. You can find the published plugins on the Haychdev WordPress.org profile.

Questions, bug reports, or ideas? Get in touch.