Draft Forge is the AI content plugin in the Forge Suite. It mines topic ideas out of the site you already have, drafts posts on those topics, and rewrites posts that have gone stale — each one passing a quality gate before it is allowed anywhere near publish.
Three things are worth being precise about, because they are what makes the product honest. The first: the AI work is free-tier and paid for with Forge credits, the same wallet every other Forge plugin draws on. Drafting a post costs credits whether or not you hold a licence. The second: what the Pro add-on sells is the autopilot — putting generation on a schedule, and publishing without a human in the loop. Charging a subscription for the model call the credits already paid for would be selling the same thing twice. The third: the gate is not a formality. Four of its five checks are measurements a database can make — length, links, an image direction, distance from your own archive — and the fifth reads the prose the way a person skims it and objects in words, with the sentence quoted. It ships in the free plugin, costs no credits and asks about no licence.
Two things landed on 2026-09-05 that change who is in the room. A draft can now be handed to the person who is allowed to say yes: the author generates, the editor approves, and the autopilot will not publish past a draft that is waiting on that answer. And the autopilot has brakes of its own — a weekly publishing cap and a checkpoint that pauses it until somebody confirms.
Draft Forge is built by Avakode (avakode.com). Its landing is draftforgewp.com.
## Quick facts
- Two plugins:
draftforge(Free, WordPress.org channel) anddraftforge-pro(the autopilot; requires the free core). - Free: topic mining (heuristic and AI); outlines, drafts and refreshes of stale posts; the five-check quality gate including the AI-slop lint; the brand-voice profile read out of your own published posts; review roles — an author asks, an editor decides; internal-link and image-prompt rewriting; the diff review that stands in front of a refresh; the editorial calendar, including scheduling one draft for a date of your choosing; the credit ledger and the monthly credit ceiling; the six WP-CLI commands; and the handoffs to Rank Forge (focus keyword) and Lang Forge (translation).
- Pro: scheduled generation — up to ten new drafts and ten refreshes per run, at a frequency you set, draining the same Topics list the free plugin fills — automatic publishing of drafts that pass the quality gate, the weekly publishing cap and the publication checkpoint that stop that autopilot on their own, and the forecast layer drawn on top of the free calendar.
- Free, and often assumed to be Pro: the slop lint and its three strictness presets, the review workflow and its capability, the brand-voice analysis, the whole of WP-CLI, the diff review of a refresh, the calendar grid and the dated publish, the credit ledger and the ceiling.
- Withdrawn on 2026-09-04: “bulk topic queue” and “automatic refresh of stale posts” were sold as separate Pro features. Both name parts of what the scheduled run already does, and no code anywhere checked either as a feature of its own. They are gone from the price list rather than kept as words.
- Credits: AI actions are metered by the shared Forge credit balance — AI topic mining 2, a post outline 1, the body of a post 5 (so a draft is about 6), a refresh 3, a brand-voice analysis 2. The lint, the review workflow, the calendar, the gate itself and every WP-CLI command that only reads cost nothing. Credits are bought in packs and work across every Forge plugin you own. Since 1.2.0 the prices are read from the Forge API rather than only from the list the plugin shipped with, and every charge is written to a ledger the Credits tab reads.
- Version pairing: free 1.3.0 needs Pro 1.3.0 or newer — it is the first core to call for the cap and the checkpoint, and an older add-on is reported as absent rather than crashed. Pro 1.3.0 still boots on a core of 1.2.0 or newer: this wave moved the requirement in one direction only.
- Pricing (annual, Forge Builder): Personal $39/yr (1 site), Professional $89/yr (5 sites), Agency $159/yr (unlimited). Set discounts: 2 tools 15%, 3 tools 25%, 4 or more 35%.
- Requirements: WordPress 6.5+, PHP 7.4+.