You might be an user of our free Crosswords WordPress plugin. If you have never seen it, you could first read this blog post to see what it could do for your site and your users. In a few words: it makes easy to create crosswords and word search puzzles and add them to your posts and pages, so you can keep your users entertained, and coming back for more. You can create with AI assistance or by yourself.
The free plugin has full features, not teasers to tempt you and then asking you to upgrade. You can create puzzles from a word list, which you can type manually, or get it generated by AI using the dependency the plugin has on our free agentic and generative AI plugin.
You can also create puzzles from your existing posts, and then add the puzzles to those or to other posts.
So, what value does the pro version adds to the free and full featured version?
The retention problem publishers already know about
It is a well known problem: readers land on one article from search or social, and then they are gone. They have no reason to open your site tomorrow instead of someone else’s.
Daily puzzles work as a retention tool because they give readers a small, low-effort reason to come back at a specific time, and that habit compounds.
The tools available to do this on WordPress, though, have mostly been aimed at large publishers or they just charge too much, often for too little.
What Pro actually does
Every time you publish a new post, EV-Crosswords Pro generates both a crossword and a word search from that post’s own content — using whatever AI provider you’ve already connected (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or your own Ollama instance) — and appends them directly to the article. No separate “today’s puzzle” page to build traffic for; the puzzle lives where your reader already is.
On top of that, Pro adds reader streaks and a leaderboard tied specifically to completing your site’s daily puzzle, and retention analytics that tell you whether puzzle-players are actually coming back more than everyone else, and whether that trend is moving up or down over time. It’s not general site analytics — you’ve already got Google Analytics or Plausible for that — it’s specifically built to answer “is this puzzle habit doing what I hoped it would?”
Simple pricing
Pro – Single Site is $79/year (or just $8/month), and covers one website. It’s where most publishers start.
Pro – Agencies is $199/year and covers up to 5 sites, built for small agencies or anyone running more than one property.
Pro – Unlimited is $419/year with no site cap, for agencies managing puzzles across a larger portfolio.
All three bill monthly or annually, and annual billing saves you about two months’ cost versus paying month to month. The free tier stays exactly as capable as it has always been — unlimited manual and AI-assisted puzzle creation, no artificial limits pushing you toward an upgrade you don’t need yet.
If daily automated puzzles and reader retention data aren’t useful to you yet, the free plugin is there for you to use, useful and with no expiration date.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you are already running the free plugin, upgrading takes a few minutes from the pricing page — pick the plan that matches how many sites you run, and automation starts working on your very next published post. If you have never tried the plugin, give a try to the free plugin and see if it makes sense for your site and your users, or you can go for the pro version which contains all the free features plus additional value.