Where things stood in April 2025. This is a progress update written during the build and kept at its original date, so it describes plans rather than a finished product. IronMaps™ shipped as a single plan at $249 per year with everything included, and there is no Lite or Pro tier. For what the product does today, see the IronMaps™ product page.

In this shorter update, I'm sharing our general progress on the new mapping application, where we're at, what we have left to do, and how we hope to get this plugin to market by the end of May 2025. Developing a plugin like this is a complicated effort. We are dealing with the core logic and the interface, and also with how to deliver updates to paying customers from our own infrastructure rather than through the WordPress plugin repository. The repository requires GPL compatible licensing, which is incompatible with shipping this as a commercial product, and we did not spend this kind of time and money to give up control of what we built.

As we've learned, the journey from a concept to a finished product is rarely straightforward. We've been all over the road! Since announcing IronMaps earlier, our small team has been heads down in a "development bubble," working through the technical challenges of building a mapping solution that addresses the real operating needs of North American businesses first.

We live and work here, we know this culture, and we've had the opportunity to gain strategic insights into business needs since we opened our doors for freelance work in 2017. Building something this size single-handed would have taken years rather than months, and the work was moving faster than that.

Where Sold

I know it's a touchy subject for many right now, but we're only selling this in the United States to start with. Canada comes after the product is refined. From a tax and legal standpoint, starting here is far easier, and it lets us talk directly with the user groups we know are unhappy with what they have today. Regional and country specific regulations have to be met as well. So foreign sign-ups and transactions are not accepted, and that is enforced rather than simply stated. For those outside the United States, our apologies, and you'll need to be patient. We're too small to register in multiple countries right now, so we'll do what we can here first and expand outward.

Tech Stack Changes

We've shifted our core technology stack for now, migrating from TypeScript and Angular to React inside the WordPress plugin container. This wasn't a decision we made lightly. It gives us better compatibility with the WordPress ecosystem while holding the performance and reliability we demand. Government work was on our mind while we made it, and the shifts in national economic priorities in the US have made investing in county and state government projects "risky business" for smaller firms at this time. The migration is nearly complete, and most features are implemented in the new framework.

User Interface Development

Our interface is taking shape with a Bootstrap and React combination that gives us proper mobile responsiveness, which we treated as a requirement rather than something to add later. We've completed the primary admin interface, configured visualization libraries for easier graphical reporting, and built location management screens and category configuration tools that don't require technical expertise to operate.

We didn't want to ship a stock, unstyled WordPress admin screen. React and Gutenberg both exist on this platform, which makes for a good combination for building a workflow that updates tables in real time instead of reloading the page. It's our first attempt at this, and we'll improve it over time with user feedback and continued testing.

Distribution Challenges

Believe it or not, the hardest part of this hasn't been the application. It's been the distribution system. Because the plugin ships commercially rather than through the WordPress repository, the delivery and update path is ours to build and ours to run, and that has turned out to be a larger piece of work than the mapping itself.

IronMaps has shipped since this was written. For what it does now, see the product page, and if you have a specific mapping or directory problem you'd like to talk through, reach out to our team.