Everything the Home screen knows about products it does not have installed comes from the catalogue, and the catalogue comes from two places at once.
The two sources:
- A remote file fetched from resultswithkevin.com, which is the canonical, up to date list
- A copy bundled inside the plugin itself, so the catalogue still renders when the site is offline or the server is unreachable
When the remote fetch succeeds, the two are merged. Remote entries win wherever both describe the same product, and any product that exists only in the bundled copy is appended. That means a plugin added in the latest Hub release shows up even if the server catalogue has not caught up, and a price or sales page change on the server appears without a plugin update. If the remote fetch fails, the bundled copy is used on its own.
The result is cached for one hour. That cache is dropped automatically whenever the Hub's own version number changes, which is what stops the familiar problem of updating the Hub and not seeing the new products it was supposed to introduce.
What is in the bundled catalogue:
The copy shipping with version 1.0.37 is catalogue version 1.0.7, dated 13 July 2026. It describes twenty entries: eight parent plugins and twelve add ons. Two of the parents are marked as the free tier, so they render in the 100% Free Plugins block on Home. The catalogue carries names, taglines, categories, icons, sales page links and the plugin file path for each product. It contains no prices.
How the Hub decides you already own something:
Detection happens in two stages. First it checks whether the product has registered itself through the Hub registration API. If not, it falls back to asking WordPress whether that plugin file is active. The second stage is what stops a freshly installed plugin from still showing a Get It button just because it has not shipped a registration block yet.
Forcing a refresh:
The bottom of the Home screen has a Refresh catalog link. It drops the cache and pulls a fresh copy immediately, then reloads Home with a confirmation notice. The daily background job also refreshes the catalogue on its own schedule, so in normal use you never need to touch it.