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There’s a story behind the name that most of our users have never heard.
When Alexander Gilmanov, the founder of what is now Melograno Venture Studio, was ready to release his new WordPress booking plugin back in 2018, he couldn’t find a name that felt right. He tried dozens of options. None of them clicked. It reminded him, he later said, of the exact same feeling he and his wife had when they were choosing a name for their newborn daughter.
And then it hit him.
He gave the plugin the same name he gave his daughter. Amelia.
“When I say that the Amelia plugin is built with love, it’s not just a figure of speech for me,” he wrote. “There’s nothing more satisfying than to see Amelia grow – both my daughter, who’s soon to start school, and the plugin.”
That was eight years ago. Today, Amelia the plugin is active on over 90,000 websites across every continent – from busy clinics in the US to yoga studios in Australia, from beauty salons in the UK to event organizers across Europe and beyond. Translated into 35+ languages, processing more than 16,000 appointments every week and 20,000 events every month. And Amelia the daughter? She just started school.
We thought that deserved a proper celebration – and a proper story.
If you want to hear the full story in Alex’s own words, the early mistakes, the sleepless nights, what it actually feels like to go from writing code to running a 50-person company, he sat down with WP Tavern’s Jukebox podcast in 2024 for a two-part conversation that covers all of it. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of that conversation.
Where It All Started
The team behind Amelia didn’t set out to build a booking plugin. They set out to build great software.
Alexander Gilmanov founded TMS, now Melograno Venture Studio, in Belgrade, Serbia in 2014. He was a full-stack developer who had made the jump from writing code to building a product company, a transition he has described as one of the hardest parts of his career. The company’s first product was wpDataTables, a WordPress plugin for tables and charts that became a success story of its own.
That success gave the team both the confidence and the funding to build something new.
The idea for Amelia came from a problem they kept seeing around them. Service businesses were still trying to manage bookings with forms, spreadsheets, phone calls and disconnected tools. Salon owners, therapists, yoga instructors and photographers all needed the same thing: a booking system that was powerful enough to run their day-to-day operations, but simple enough for small business owners to actually use.
Official development started in Q2 2017. From the beginning, the team built Amelia around Domain-Driven Design, giving it an enterprise-grade foundation most WordPress plugins skip. It was never meant to be just a form with a calendar attached. It was built as a proper booking engine, with the kind of architecture that could support employees, services, locations, schedules and more complex business setups as the product grew.
In June 2018, Amelia launched at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade. It was our home city and our first WordCamp as a sponsor.
Our developer Željko still remembers one of the first reactions from the floor:
“I remember one visitor who was really interested in wpDataTables, but when we showed him Amelia, which we had just launched, his reaction was basically: ‘There are already too many booking plugins. You don’t stand a chance.’ And now, here we are.”
— Željko, Amelia Developer
WordCamp Belgrade 2018
But that same booth also gave the team one of its first signs that Amelia had found the right audience. Bogdan, our Head of Marketing, remembers selling one Amelia license directly at WordCamp Belgrade, something that almost never happens at an event booth.
“We sold one Amelia license right there at the booth, which is very rare for an event like that. And that user is still with us today.”
— Bogdan, Head of Marketing
Those first reactions were not all blind excitement. There was skepticism, curiosity and one very early customer who decided to take a chance on Amelia right there in Belgrade. Together, they confirmed something important: the market was crowded, and if Amelia was going to work, it had to be better, not just newer.
Eight Years, Eight Leaps
Looking back, the story of Amelia isn’t really a story about features. It’s a story about listening, to users, to the market, and sometimes to the world itself.
Here’s how the journey looked, one era at a time.
2018 – The Beginning
The first version of Amelia launched with everything a service business needed to get started: appointments, employees, locations, working hours, customer management, a booking calendar, and automated notifications. Clean. Fast. Reliable.
It hit CodeCanyon’s Weekly Top Sellers list within weeks.
What none of us knew at the time was that this foundation, built deliberately, with architecture most developers would call overkill for a WordPress plugin, would be exactly what allowed everything that came after.
2019 – Amelia Gets a Second Story
One year in, we added the feature that doubled Amelia’s audience overnight: the Events module.
Suddenly Amelia wasn’t just for salons and clinics. It was for yoga retreats, photography workshops, corporate training sessions, community events. Any business that needed to sell tickets, manage attendance, and handle recurring schedules.
At the same time, WooCommerce integration and Google Calendar two-way sync went live – the first signs of what would become one of Amelia’s defining strengths: fitting naturally into the tools businesses already use, rather than forcing them to change.
2020 – Building Through Uncertainty
In early 2020, the world changed. Businesses that had never considered virtual appointments and events, were suddenly dependent on them.
We shipped Zoom integration quickly. Then Google Meet. The booking flow that had been designed for in-person services adapted, almost seamlessly, to the new reality. Clients could book a virtual consultation the same way they’d book a haircut.
Over time, Amelia expanded beyond Zoom and Google Meet to support more virtual meeting workflows, including Microsoft Teams and LessonSpace.
Behind the scenes, something else was starting: the earliest conversations about what would eventually become Trafft – a standalone SaaS platform for businesses that had outgrown WordPress entirely. Not a replacement for Amelia. A natural next step for the customers who needed it.
2022 – The First Big Reinvention
By 2022, Amelia had grown in every direction – more features, more integrations, more users in more countries. But the booking form itself, the thing customers saw every time they booked an appointment, hadn’t kept up.
Amelia 5.0 changed that. A completely redesigned booking experience, rebuilt from the ground up based on what users told us wasn’t working. Cleaner steps, smarter flow, better mobile experience.
We celebrated version 5.0 the only way that felt right: at WordCamp Europe in Porto – our third WordCamp, and the first time we got to throw a proper birthday party for the plugin. Four years old, and just getting started.
WordCamp Porto 2022
That same summer, WhatsApp notifications went live. Because sometimes your clients aren’t checking email. They’re on their phones, on WhatsApp, and a booking reminder in their chat is worth ten emails in their inbox.
2023 – Power Features for Complex Businesses
The businesses that had grown with Amelia started asking for things that simple booking plugins couldn’t handle.
A spa with three treatment rooms shared between six therapists. A photography studio with equipment that could only be in one place at a time.
Amelia 6.0 introduced Shared Resources – the ability to attach rooms, equipment, or any physical asset to multiple employees or locations, with availability managed automatically. Book a massage therapist, and the treatment room is blocked. Cancel the appointment, and the room opens back up.
Around the same period, packages and recurring appointments matured too, giving businesses more flexibility for memberships, repeated sessions and longer customer relationships.
It was the moment Amelia stopped being a booking plugin for simple service businesses and became something businesses could genuinely build their operations on.
2024 – The Business Layer
WordCamp Torino 2024
A booking plugin that just books appointments is half a product. In 2024, we focused on the business side.
Native invoicing meant businesses could manage their finances directly from the same dashboard they used to manage their calendar. No more exporting to spreadsheets. No more chasing down separate tools.
Apple Calendar integration filled a gap that had frustrated users for years – and that a major competitor had just abandoned. Multiple payment options went live: Apple Pay and Google Pay via Stripe, making checkout faster for customers and reducing drop-off at the final step.
Social login with Google and Facebook also made the booking experience faster for returning customers.
Amelia crossed 80,000 active installs that year. Not with a press release. Just by continuing to ship things users actually needed.
2025 – Starting Over, on Purpose
Some redesigns happen because a product is failing. This one happened because we refused to let it age.
The question the team kept coming back to in early 2024 was a simple, uncomfortable one: does Amelia still feel as good to use as it did when you first chose it?
For a lot of users, honestly – it didn’t. The features were there. The reliability was there. But years of additions had left the interface feeling like it had been built in layers, because it had been.
So we started over. Not on the engine – the architecture that had been built in 2017 was still sound. But on every surface a user would ever touch.
Amelia 9.0 launched in December 2025, shaped by more than 400 alpha and beta testers who spent months breaking things, questioning decisions, and pushing us to do better. Light and dark mode. A completely rebuilt admin experience. One-click scheduling from the calendar. A dedicated Events dashboard. Full-screen flows that didn’t feel like they were apologizing for being WordPress.
It was the biggest release we’d ever shipped. And the response from the community told us the wait had been worth it.
That same year, TMS – the company name that had been on every invoice and plugin page since 2014 – became Melograno Venture Studio. The name is Italian for pomegranate: a fruit full of seeds, each one holding the potential to grow into something. It felt right for a company that had grown from one plugin into a full ecosystem.
2026 – The Next Chapter Begins
v1.0 booking form vs. v9.0 booking form
We’re only a few months into year eight, and it already feels different. Take a look at what changes with the Amelia 9.0 revamp!
Angie AI integration (v9.1) means that for the first time, you can manage Amelia in natural language. Type “book ‘Make up’ service for Jane Doe on 14th of July at 16:00pm” and let the plugin do the rest. Create an appointment without navigating through the dashboard. It’s not a gimmick, it’s the beginning of a genuinely new way to interact with your booking system.
Version 9.5 took it further, connecting Amelia to the WordPress Abilities API and an MCP adapter, making it part of the broader ecosystem of AI tools that are reshaping how software gets used.
Multiple Google Calendars per employee. Multiple Outlook Calendars. Better daily views. Faster everything.
We don’t know exactly what the next eight years look like. But we know what direction we’re heading.
The People Who Built It
Numbers are easy to write. The harder thing to capture is the team.
Amelia started with five people. Today, more than 20 people work specifically on Amelia, as part of a company of 50+ across all of Melograno’s products. The same people who were there at WordCamp Belgrade in 2018 are still here – alongside dozens of others who’ve joined along the way.
For Alex, that growth has always been tied to something deeper than headcount.
“Amelia has been more than just a product for me from the very beginning. I was investing a big part of myself in it, and I always wanted it to have a soul. That became one of the guiding principles for how I built the early team. Not just skill, but caring. Treating the plugin as a craft, almost as an art, not just as a job to do.
I still remember those early days, when you keep investing in the product and you don’t know yet whether it will be needed, whether it will land. Everything feels sensitive and fragile. You refresh the page, watch every new download, and every review feels essential.
It was genuinely rewarding to find a team from the start who felt it the same way, and who have brought that same care to everything we do with Amelia to this day.”
What we can say is this: the people behind Amelia have the same obsession they started with. Not with features, or metrics, or competitive positioning. With the question of whether the person trying to book an appointment, and the business owner trying to run their day, ends up better off than they were before.
That’s the job. It always has been.
By the Numbers
Eight years of building leaves a trail. Here’s what ours looks like.
| 90,000+ active installs on WordPress.org | 4.6 / 5 ★ across 751 reviews |
|---|---|
| 16,000+ appointments booked every week | 20,000+ events managed every month |
| 35+ languages Amelia is translated into | Every continent – from North America and Europe to Australia and beyond |
| 8,000+ tickets handled in the first half of 2026 alone | 8 years of continuous development |
| 0 outside investors | 400+ users who shaped the 9.0 redesign |
Reliability is easy to claim and hard to prove. We think the support numbers say it better than any marketing copy can.
Our team handled over 8,000 tickets in the first half of 2026 alone. Average customer satisfaction across that period: 84%. Median first reply time: under 26 hours – within the next business day, for most users. During peak weeks, individual agents were closing 50 to 65 tickets per day.
Behind every one of those tickets is a real business, a salon that can’t afford the booking system going down on a Saturday morning, a clinic where a missed appointment means a missed patient. In 2024 we introduced an AI-assisted layer to our support workflow, not to hand tickets to a bot, but to help our agents respond faster without sacrificing the quality of the answer. The same human judgment, in less time. Because a tool that goes quiet when you need it most isn’t a tool you can build a business on.
What You’ve Said About It
Over 750 reviews on WordPress.org. A 4.6 out of 5 rating. But the ones that stay with us aren’t the scores, they’re the sentences.
“After 5 years of using Amelia as a reliable and professional booking system, I can confidently say it has become an essential part of my workflow as a photographer.” — Jean Philippe B., 5★ WordPress.org review
“I have been working with them for more than 2 years and I am very happy… they have improved a lot in the last year. If you need a plugin to manage your reservations, automations for email, WhatsApp etc. — go for it!” — ionutzzzdaniel, Episculpt Beauty, Romania, 5★ WordPress.org review
“Amelia has been an outstanding booking solution for our aesthetic medical practice. Excellent customer service — fast, competent, and solution-oriented.” — iromek, aesthetic medical practice, 5★ WordPress.org review
To every person who’s left a review, filed a support ticket, voted on a feature, joined an alpha test, or just quietly used Amelia every day to run their business – thank you. This product is yours as much as it is ours.
To the Next Eight Years
Eight years is a long time in software. Entire platforms have risen and fallen. The WordPress ecosystem has changed around us, repeatedly.
Earlier this year, Alex sat down with the WP Legends Podcast to talk about where Melograno is heading – the ecosystem vision, what building in WordPress looks like in 2026, and why bootstrapped still means something. Worth a listen if you want to know what year nine looks like from the inside.
Amelia is still here. Still growing. Still bootstrapped. Still built by a team that genuinely cares whether it works for you.
The features voting board at features.wpamelia.com is open. The team reads every submission. The 9.0 redesign was shaped directly by users who showed up for the alpha, and the next big thing will be too.
And because birthdays should come with something more than a story, we’re also preparing a special Amelia offer around one of the newest parts of the Melograno ecosystem: the Amelia and IvyForms integration. More on that very soon.
If you’ve been with us since the beginning: thank you for staying.
If you’re discovering Amelia for the first time through this post: welcome. We’ve spent eight years getting ready for you.
Here’s to the next eight. 🎂
The Amelia Team, Melograno Venture Studio, Belgrade
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