Respira vs WPVibe: one puts a meter on your AI. One doesn't.

The short version

Respira and WPVibe both connect the AI you already use, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Cursor and others, to a WordPress site. They differ in four ways that matter once you work on client sites every day.

• WPVibe meters your AI's work. Respira does not. Every WPVibe plan is a daily allowance of tool calls, shared across all your sites, and when it runs out WPVibe blocks further calls until allowance frees up. Respira counts site slots, the number of sites you need connected at the same time, not usage. There is no daily cap on what your AI does, and you can point any slot at another site when you no longer work on the one it holds.
• WPVibe edits a live page in place. Respira edits a draft copy. With WPVibe, changes to existing posts and pages go live immediately. With Respira, they land on a copy a person approves, and every page and post write saves a snapshot you can restore for 90 days.
• WPVibe sits between your AI and your site. Respira does not. WPVibe is a hosted relay that holds an application password for each site. Connected directly, Respira sends your content between your site and your AI, never through Respira's servers.
• WPVibe has skills for the most common builders. Respira supports 17. Each is written in its own format, including Oxygen, WPBakery, Brizy and Flatsome, which WPVibe does not cover.

I wrote this for two readers: someone choosing between these two, and anyone choosing an AI tool for WordPress at all. AI work on WordPress is new, and buyers deserve a way to judge tools that does not depend on who wrote the comparison. So besides the comparison, this page gives you eight questions to ask any tool, this one included, and a test you can run in an afternoon.

WPVibe is the better choice in some cases, and this page says which. Every statement about WPVibe links to WPVibe's own page, as checked on 3 October 2026. If something here is out of date, write to word@respira.press and I'll correct it the same day.

WPVibe

1. Your AI asks for a change
2. The live page changes

Undo: deletes go to the trash; a published theme keeps a backup.

Respira

1. Your AI asks for a change
2. A draft copy changes
3. A person approves
4. The live page changes

Undo: a snapshot of every page and post write, restorable for 90 days.

WPVibe

1. Your AI app
2. WPVibe's relayUnited States · holds an application password for each site · logs kept up to 24 months
3. Your site

Respira

1. Your AI app
2. Your site

Respira is not in the path. The exception is Respira AER, the optional hosted chat.

Everyone meters AI. Respira does not.

AI products usually charge by usage in one form or another: tokens, credits, requests, generations, a daily allowance. Your AI provider already does. Claude, ChatGPT and Grok bill you by subscription limits or by tokens for the thinking your AI does.

WPVibe adds a second meter on top of that one, on the same work: the tool calls your AI makes against your site. Listing pages, reading a page, editing it, uploading an image, each one counts. Its pricing page says the allowance is counted over a rolling 24 hours, shared across every site on the account ("per account, not per site"), and that "when you hit the cap, WPVibe blocks further counted calls and tells you when allowance frees up again."

Respira has no second meter. There is no tool-call allowance, no daily cap, nothing to top up, no overage, and no credits or tokens to buy. Respira does not sell AI either: your AI runs on the subscription or key you already have, and Respira adds nothing to that bill. The price of a Respira plan is the number of site slots, and it is the same in a quiet month and in the month you rebuild three client sites.

What this does not cover, so you can hold me to it: two optional features that do their work on Respira's own servers come with a monthly allowance included in the plan. Those are Respira Exhale, which turns an HTML design into a builder page, and unattended cloud runs in Respira AER. There is nothing to buy on top of either; a larger plan includes more.

Usage limits exist to catch a runaway AI agent doing 50,000 edits in a loop. They do not exist to monetize normal work.

Respira pricing philosophy

So Respira has exactly one usage limit, and it is a safety rail, not a price. Each site accepts up to 1,000 tool calls an hour per key by default, which is room for a long, busy editing session and a hard stop for an agent stuck in a loop. It lives on your own site, and the site owner can raise it to 100,000 an hour, or lower it, in the plugin's settings. Reaching it costs nothing and buys nothing; calls free up again as the hour moves on. Respira's fair usage policy is about account sharing and reselling, and the first step under it is always a message, never a lockout.

What a daily cap means on a real workload

Most days are quiet, and a daily cap does not matter on those days. It matters on the others: a site rebuild, a migration, a content refresh across every client, an agent left to work through a long list.

So I measured them from Respira's own records of the tool calls made through it. The third column is the share of active Respira users that, in the 18 days from 16 September 2026 to 3 October 2026, had at least one day over that WPVibe plan's daily allowance. Next to it, the Respira plan at the same annual price or less (each in its own currency). The match is by price, not by number of sites: WPVibe plans cover unlimited sites, Respira plans a number of slots.

• Free 100 a day 45%
• Pro 500 a day 12%
• Power 2,000 a day 2%
• Agency 5,000 a day under 1%
• Scale 10,000 a day under 1%

On Respira, every one of those days costs the same as a quiet one.

* A default you control, not a plan limit. It stops a runaway agent, it lives on your own site, and the site owner can raise it to 100,000 calls an hour, which is 2,400,000 a day. In practice, unlimited.

** The number of sites connected at the same time. Any slot can move to another site whenever you stop working on the one it holds, so over a year one plan can serve far more sites than its number.

Nearly half of active Respira accounts had at least one day that WPVibe's free plan would have stopped. One in eight went past the Pro allowance. The busiest single day was 10,504 calls, on one account, more than WPVibe's largest plan allows. On Respira, every one of those days cost the same as a quiet one.

That window is short, because Respira has recorded every tool call only since 16 September 2026. A longer window can only add busy days. For the five and a half months before it, from 1 April 2026 to 15 September 2026, only edits and uploads were recorded, not reads, so the count is a floor. Even so, 24% of accounts had a day with more than 100 writes alone, 4% had one with more than 500, and the busiest day had 8,614 writes.

This is not a hypothetical. In August a WPVibe user on a paid plan wrote on WordPress.org that "once the balance is depleted, you cannot simply continue working. You have to stop, wait for a few credits to come back, perform a few more actions, and then wait again," and that this "makes bulk content creation, repeated WordPress operations, and any sustained professional use almost impossible." WPVibe's author replied that the allowance is a rolling 24-hour window, that heavy sessions "can burn through that window quickly", and that "higher tiers are there for serious daily / bulk use."

Read these numbers with two things in mind. They are calendar days, and WPVibe counts a rolling 24 hours, which can only catch more busy windows, so the figures understate how often a cap would have been hit. And the two products cut their tools differently, so the same job can take a different number of calls in each. Treat this as a picture of how uneven real work is, not as a quote for your own account.

Slots, not sites

Respira counts site slots: the number of sites you need connected at the same time. It is not a list of fixed websites. When you no longer work on a site, change the slot to another one: disconnect the old site in your dashboard and connect the new one, with no fee and no waiting period. On a one-site plan you do not even do that: connect a new site and the slot moves to it.

How often can you move a slot? As often as your work needs. On a one-site plan, from the sixth move (more than 5), your billing page suggests the next plan up, because someone who keeps swapping their one slot usually needs two. It is a suggestion on a page. Nothing is blocked, slowed or charged, and moves on larger plans are not counted at all.

JanJFebFMarMAprAMayMJunJJulJAugASepSOctONovNDecD Slot 1 client-a.exampleclient-f.example Slot 2 client-b.example Slot 3 client-c.exampleclient-g.example Slot 4 client-d.exampleclient-h.example Slot 5 client-e.example

8 client sites in a year on 5 slots, for €150 a year, with no meter on any of them.

The price per slot falls as you add them, and none of them carries a usage meter:

The same product on every plan

What changes between Respira plans is the number of slots, not what the product can do. Every plan gets every core tool, all 17 page builders, the whole safety layer (draft copies, approvals, plan mode, 90-day snapshots), site memory, Art Direction, the security and accessibility scans, Exhale and the skills. Three things start at Builder, because they only make sense once you work with clients or more than one site: Murmur client review links, AER runs across several sites, and paid team seats. WPVibe's author describes WPVibe the same way, "plans differ by volume, not by locking features". The difference is what the volume is: on WPVibe it is how much your AI may do each day, on Respira it is how many sites you look after.

WooCommerce is the one add-on that adds tools, and it is an add-on on purpose. Its 104 store tools would otherwise sit in every AI session on every site, store or not, crowding the tool list your AI chooses from and the context it pays for. So a site without a store does not carry them, and Studio and Founder include them.

WPVibe takes the other approach: unlimited sites, one allowance between them. That is a good fit for many sites with light use. The more of your sites have a busy day at the same time, the more that shared allowance becomes the thing you plan around.

Side by side

What else each one does

The table above is about how the two connect, edit and charge. This one is about everything around the edit: the work an agency does for clients every week. "Not listed" means I read all 380 public pages of wpvibe.ai on 3 October 2026 and none of them mentions it. If WPVibe has it, tell me and I'll fix the row.

Who builds it, and who answers

WPVibe is a SeedProd product, "built by the team behind SeedProd", with John Turner as its founder and Syed Balkhi as CEO (About). Syed Balkhi has built WordPress businesses for 17 years, since he created WPBeginner in 2009; his companies include Awesome Motive, WPForms and OptinMonster, and he acquired SeedProd in 2018 (his own account, SeedProd). That is deep WordPress experience behind the product. It ships often: 16 plugin releases in the 30 days to 3 October 2026, by its own changelog.

Respira is built and supported by its founder, me, in Brașov, Romania. The benefit of that is easy to measure: the person who reads your bug report is the person who writes the fix, and nothing sits in a queue between them. Measured live, the same numbers the pricing page shows:

• Support email answered in a median of 3 hours.
• 339 reported bugs fixed in the last 90 days, half of them within about 40 hours.
• 66 plugin releases in the last 30 days.

The fair question to ask any product built this way is what happens to your sites if it stops. With Respira, the answer is in how it writes: everything it creates is native content in your own WordPress site, in your builder's own format, so your pages keep working with the plugin switched off, and nothing you built is held inside Respira.

White label: hidden, or yours

Both products offer white label, and they mean different things by it. One removes the maker's badge. The other puts yours on.

WPVibe

• Dashboard
• Posts
• Media
• Pages
• Comments
• Appearance
• Plugins
• Users
• Tools
• Settings

The WPVibe menu, dashboard widget and plugins-list row are gone.

Respira

• Dashboard
• Your Studio
• Posts
• Media
• Pages
• Comments
• Appearance
• Plugins
• Users
• Tools
• Settings

The menu carries your studio name and logo; the Respira row in the plugins list is hidden.

WPVibe hides the tool

Free on every plan. One click hides every WPVibe surface in the site's dashboard: the admin menu, the dashboard widget, the plugins list entry, the editor sidebar and its rows on the Updates and Site Health screens. The client sees no tool at all. Turning it on always asks for approval, because it also hides the approval log. Docs

Respira shows your studio

An add-on: €200 a year for up to 3 sites, or €500 a year for every site on your plan. Your studio's name, logo, accent color and support contact replace Respira's in the plugin in wp-admin, on the review links your clients open, on the approve bar and on client reports, and client questions go to your support address. White label

Which one you want depends on the story you tell the client. If the tool should be invisible, WPVibe's free mode does that. If the client should see your studio's own product, with your name on the reviews they leave and the reports they read, that is what Respira's add-on is for.

Data and legal

For an agency, the paperwork is part of the product: it is what you sign on your clients' behalf. This compares the two companies' terms, privacy policies and data processing agreements as published on 3 October 2026. Three rows favour WPVibe, and they are here too.

Eight questions to ask any AI tool for WordPress

These are the questions I would want answered before letting any AI tool near a client site, Respira included. Each one links to where this page answers it for both products.

1. What happens when the AI edits a published page? A good answer: the change waits somewhere a person can see it before visitors do, or at least it is saved so it can be put back. Side by side
2. What can you undo, and for how long? Ask which changes are covered. Page content is the easy part; plugins, users, menus and settings are where answers get vague. Undo
3. How does it charge, and what happens when you hit a limit in the middle of a job? A cap that stops an agent halfway through a rebuild is a different risk from a cap that only shows up on an invoice. Usage
4. Where does your site's content go? Directly between your site and your AI, or through the vendor's servers? Read the security page, not only the FAQ. Data and legal
5. What credentials does it hold, and how do you revoke them? You should be able to cut access from your own WordPress admin in one step. Credentials
6. Which page builders does it write natively, and which only partly? "Supports" can mean read, write, or a skill that describes the builder. Ask for the list with the exceptions. Builders
7. What happens to your data when you delete your account? Look for a clear answer in the data processing agreement, with times. Deletion
8. What happens to your sites if the tool goes away? The safest answer is that everything it made is ordinary WordPress content that keeps working without it. Continuity

Test them yourself

Public pages, this one included, are a starting point. The fair test takes an afternoon on a staging copy of a real site, with the same AI model on both tools:

1. Ask each tool for the same three jobs: an edit in your page builder, a WooCommerce product update, and undoing the edit afterwards.
2. For each job, write down whether it finished, how long it took, how many tool calls it made, and how often you had to step in.
3. Then look at the published site and the undo, not at the chat. What reached the page is the result.

If you run this test and the result differs from what this page says, write to me and I will update the page.

When WPVibe is the better choice

• You want to start free and stay free for light use.
• You look after many sites that each see a little AI work, and their busy days rarely line up.
• You want WP-CLI-style commands, SQL with approval, or theme-file work in a sandboxed draft theme.
• You are fine with edits to existing content going live as they happen.
• You want to install from WordPress.org.
• You want WooCommerce tools on every plan, the free one included, and a price that stays locked for as long as you stay subscribed.

When Respira is the better choice

• You do not want a meter on your AI's work. Rebuilds, migrations and long agent runs cost the same as a quiet day, and nothing stops halfway through.
• You edit live client sites, and every change has to be reviewable before it goes live and reversible after.
• You need your data processed in the EU, under an EU company's contract and EU law, and gone the moment you delete your account rather than kept for up to two years.
• You want your site content to stay private. Connected directly, it goes between your site and your AI and never through Respira's servers (privacy policy). The exception is Respira AER, the optional hosted chat, which runs on Respira's servers and says so.
• Your sites run builders beyond the common few, such as Oxygen, WPBakery, Brizy, Flatsome or Thrive Architect.
• Your client list changes. Slots move to the next site whenever a project ends.
• You run an agency workflow where clients review changes on the page itself before they go live, and you hand them reports of what changed.
• You want the agency kit in one product: client feedback links, client reports, AI cost per client, team seats scoped per site, security and accessibility scans, and an AI workspace on your phone.

Questions people ask

What should I ask before choosing an AI tool for WordPress?

Eight things: what happens when the AI edits a published page; what you can undo and for how long; how it charges and what happens when you hit a limit mid-job; where your site content goes; what credentials it holds and how to revoke them; which page builders it writes natively and which only partly; what happens to your data when you delete your account; and what happens to your sites if the tool goes away.

Does WPVibe have a daily limit?

Yes. Every WPVibe plan is a daily allowance of tool calls, counted over a rolling 24 hours and shared across all the sites on the account: 100 on Free, 500 on Pro ($99 a year), 2,000 on Power ($299 a year), 5,000 on Agency ($599 a year), 10,000 on Scale ($899 a year). When the allowance runs out, WPVibe blocks further calls until it frees up again.

Is there a WPVibe alternative without a daily limit?

Respira. It sells site slots instead of usage: no tool-call allowance, no credits, no tokens and no daily cap. The one limit is a safety default against a runaway agent, 1,000 calls an hour per site key, which the site owner can raise to 100,000. Maker covers one site for €71 a year, Builder 5 sites for €150, Studio 25 sites for €451.

Where do WPVibe and Respira process data?

WPVibe is run by SeedProd, LLC in Florida and processes data in the United States; its data processing agreement says it offers no EU-only processing region. Respira is built in Brașov, Romania, under Romanian law, with its primary data store in Ireland. On a direct connection, your site's content does not pass through Respira at all.

Does Respira limit how many tool calls my AI can make?

No. Respira has no tool-call allowance, no daily cap, no credits, no tokens and no top-ups, and the price stays the same however much your AI does. The one limit is a safety rail against a runaway agent: 1,000 tool calls an hour per site key by default, set on your own site, which the site owner can raise or lower. WPVibe sells a daily allowance of tool calls, from 100 a day on its free plan to 10,000 a day on Scale, shared across all your sites, and blocks further calls when it runs out.

Can I move a Respira slot to another site?

Yes. A Respira plan is a number of site slots, not a list of fixed sites. Disconnect a site in your dashboard and the slot is free for the next one straight away. On a one-site plan, connecting a new site moves the slot for you.

What is the main difference between Respira and WPVibe?

Two things. WPVibe charges for usage: a daily allowance of tool calls. Respira does not meter usage at all; you pay for site slots. And what happens to a live page: with WPVibe, edits to existing posts, pages and media go live immediately. With Respira, an edit to a published page lands on a draft copy that a person approves before it goes live, and every page and post write saves a snapshot that can be restored for 90 days.

Does Respira only work with local, desktop AI clients?

No. Respira connects to claude.ai, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex and Cursor by signing in from the browser, with nothing to install. Any remote MCP client can connect with the site address and a key, and an optional local server is there for Claude Code and other desktop clients.

Is there a free version of Respira?

There is no free plan. Maker, for one site, starts with a 7-day free trial with no card. WPVibe has a free plan with 100 tool calls a day.

Which one is cheaper for an agency?

On a quiet month, WPVibe can be: its plans cover unlimited sites. The difference shows on busy days. WPVibe's allowance is shared across every site on the account, so 25 client sites on its Agency plan ($599 a year) share 5,000 calls a day, and a rebuild on one site eats into all the others. Respira Studio covers 25 site slots for €451 a year with no daily cap, falling to about €11.88 per slot a year at 250 slots.

How I checked

I build Respira, so read this with that in mind. Every WPVibe fact on this page comes from WPVibe's own pages, checked on 3 October 2026: the WordPress.org listing, pricing, agencies page, changelog, security page, docs and homepage. Respira's prices and counts on this page are read from Respira's own code each time the page is built. The usage figures come from Respira's own tool-call records from 16 September 2026, the day it started recording every call, to 3 October 2026, with my own accounts left out.

WPVibe publishes its own comparison. On 3 October 2026 it was out of date about Respira in these places:

• It calls Respira local-first and says it runs through a local npm server, with browser AI only through WebMCP in newer Chrome. Respira connects by URL from claude.ai, ChatGPT and Grok in the browser, with nothing to install on your computer. The npm server is one option, for coding tools.
• Its list of AI clients for Respira is coding tools only. claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Claude Cowork, ChatGPT and Grok are missing.
• It gives an older builder count. Respira supports 17 page builders today.
• It mentions a free Gutenberg-only Lite tier. There is no free plan today; Maker starts with a 7-day free trial and no card.
• It says the WooCommerce add-on is sold separately. It is included in Studio and Founder.
• It says review and approval happen in wp-admin. Clients can also review and approve a change on the page itself, from a link, without logging in.
• It describes Respira's plans as "tiered by site count" and leaves out that Respira has no usage allowance at all, which is the other half of the trade it is describing.

A thank-you

I am grateful to get to build in this space at all. Not long ago, letting an AI work on a live WordPress site was a demo. Now people do it every day, and the space keeps growing, thanks in good part to teams like SeedProd and what they have built with WPVibe. More good tools means more people trust AI with their sites, and that is good for everyone who builds on WordPress, whichever tool they choose. If you try both and pick WPVibe, I hope it serves you well.