Before Rivale, I spent six years at Kinsta. Joined as their first Editor in Chief. Left as EVP of Marketing. Built the marketing function from scratch. Freelancers, then agencies for video and podcast, then the whole department.
I left the corporate world in 2024. Not because something was wrong.
Because I wanted to build something of my own and knew if I did not make the move then, I probably never would.
I spent a year traveling, learning, and paying attention to a problem I had watched plugin founders run into again and again.
The founding story is one specific conversation
A plugin founder told me they had discovered a competitor repriced two weeks earlier from a customer support ticket. Not from any monitoring. Not from a tool. A customer asked why the competitor’s price was lower. That was the first they heard of it.
Sevaral weeks operating on wrong assumptions. Pricing conversations, positioning decisions, sales calls. All of it running on stale information.
I had seen different versions of that story more times than I could count.
I had never seen a tool that fixed it. So I decided to build one.
Rivale monitors two fronts
What competitors ship on WordPress.org: releases, reviews, changelog entries, forum threads, download velocity. And what competitors decide on their own marketing websites: pricing, positioning, feature copy, who they are targeting.
The second front is where the most damaging moves happen. A quiet repricing at 2am. A repositioning toward enterprise. A new comparison page targeting your users by name. None of it shows up on WordPress.org.
Rivale watches both. Classifies every change. Tells you what to do about it.
If this problem sounds familiar, the trial is free. 7 days. No credit card.
A few things I care about in building this:
- Depth over breadth. Rivale does competitive intelligence for WordPress plugin developers specifically. It is not a generic analytics tool that happens to include WordPress.org data. The changelog categorization, the review tagging, the forum health scoring. These are built for this ecosystem.
- No invented numbers. I am not going to tell you Rivale saves you 20 hours a week. I know what it replaces: manual checking that misses things, screenshot folders with no timestamps, and the low-grade anxiety of not knowing if the quiet week is actually quiet.
- Honest about where we are. Rivale is in closed beta. Real users. Real feedback. Things are improving every week. If something is broken or confusing, email me and I’ll fix it right away.
Matteo Duò
Founder, Rivale.io