We were checking something unrelated when this turned up twice in an hour, which is usually the sign that a small annoyance is actually a pattern.
The Veras case is the tidy one. A SketchUp Community extension thread, still surfacing in search, states the supported versions as 2021, 2022 and 2023. The vendor's own current position is SketchUp 2021 through 2026, and Revit 2022 through 2026. Three years of host releases have happened since that post was accurate. Nothing on the page says so.
The second case, found while writing today's ArkoAI first look, is the more instructive one, because it is wrong in both directions at once. The SketchUp forum thread for ArkoAI states support for "SketchUp 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023." ArkoAI's own site today says 2021 through 2026. So the thread simultaneously offers you a version that has since been dropped and hides three versions that have since been added.
Why this breaks in two different directions
Most people think of stale information as overstating. In software compatibility it does both, and the two failures cost you differently.
| Listing understates | Listing overstates | |
|---|---|---|
| What it says | Stops at an old version | Includes a dropped version |
| What you conclude | "Does not support my 2026" | "Works with my 2020" |
| What happens | You never trial it | Installer fails or add-in never loads |
| How you find out | You do not | Within ten minutes |
| Real cost | A tool that fitted, silently skipped | An afternoon, then a refund request |
The overstating case is loud and self-correcting. You install, it fails, you are irritated, you move on. The understating case is the expensive one precisely because nothing goes wrong. You searched, you read "2023," you concluded the tool was abandoned or behind, and you bought the competitor. No error message ever appears to tell you that decision was made on three-year-old data.
The listing that talks you out of a tool never tells you it was wrong. That is the whole problem with silent failures: there is no moment at which you learn.
Why the stale page outranks the true one
This is structural rather than anyone's fault, which is why it will keep happening.
Host applications ship on an annual cycle. SketchUp, Revit and the rest release a new year version every year, on schedule, whether or not anything you care about changed. Plugin vendors update to match on their own cadence, usually within weeks to months, and they record it in one place: their own compatibility documentation. Chaos maintains a support article whose entire purpose is confirming version compatibility. That page gets updated because it must.
Everything else does not. The forum announcement thread was written the week the plugin launched. The directory listing was scraped once. The roundup article states a version because the writer needed a specific detail to look thorough. None of these have an owner whose job is to revisit them, and all of them accumulate the inbound links and age signals that make them rank. The most durable page is the least maintained one. We made a related argument about dating a tool roundup before you trust it, and compatibility is the sharpest version of that problem, because it is the spec most guaranteed to change.
The order to check things in
Five minutes, in this sequence, and only the first two usually matter.
1. The vendor's own compatibility page
Not the marketing page, not the product homepage, the support or documentation page that lists versions in a table. Search the vendor's help centre for "compatibility." If a vendor does not maintain such a page for a plugin that lives inside annually released host software, treat that as information about the vendor.
2. The host application's official store listing
The Autodesk App Store shows supported Revit releases per plugin version, and it is maintained because distribution depends on it. Same logic for the SketchUp Extension Warehouse, with one caveat we hit yesterday: not every plugin distributes there. ArkoAI ships a manual Windows installer instead, so the Warehouse will tell you nothing about it. Absence from a store is not absence of support.
3. The changelog or release notes
Dated entries, which is exactly what the forum thread lacks. A release note saying "added SketchUp 2026 support" in month X is the strongest evidence available short of installing it.
4. Only then, anything else
Forum threads, directories, comparison tables, video descriptions, and yes, our own tool pages. Every one of these is a snapshot with no expiry date printed on it. Useful for discovering that a tool exists. Not evidence that it runs on your machine.
The upgrade sequencing that actually bites
There is a version of this that costs more than a wasted trial, and it is worth naming because it is avoidable and it happens every year.
Your practice upgrades the host application over a quiet week in summer. Everyone moves to the new Revit or SketchUp. Two weeks later, mid deadline, someone opens the render plugin and the toolbar is not there, because that plugin has not shipped support for the new release yet, or the licence needs reissuing against the new version. Chaos publishes a troubleshooting article specifically for plugins failing to load in SketchUp or Revit, which tells you how routine this is.
The fix is ordering, not technology. Check every plugin your project delivery depends on against the new host version before the upgrade, not after. If a critical plugin is not ready, delay the upgrade or keep the previous host version installed alongside. Both host applications allow multiple year versions to coexist. That is what the capability is for.
Add the reverse check to the annual routine too. If you have been sitting on an old host version because a plugin required it, verify that constraint is still real. Vendors drop old versions quietly, and they add new ones quietly, and the note you made in 2024 about why you cannot upgrade may have expired without telling you.
Our take
Nobody is being dishonest here. A forum post from 2023 is an accurate record of 2023 and the person who wrote it has moved on. The failure is that we search for a current fact and receive a historical one, formatted identically, with no visible difference between them.
So put the burden where it belongs. Compatibility is a claim with a shelf life, and the only pages that renew it are the ones the vendor is obliged to maintain. Everything else is a photograph of a spec, taken at an unknown moment, still hanging in the hallway.
Check the vendor's table. Check it before you upgrade, not after the toolbar disappears. And when a listing tells you a tool stops at 2023, treat that as a question rather than an answer, because the tool may well have moved on years ago and simply not have told the internet.
Written from the 18 July 2026 intel sweep, which returned a SketchUp Community thread listing Veras support as "2021, 2022 and 2023." Current Veras support (SketchUp 2021 to 2026, Revit 2022 to 2026) and current ArkoAI support (SketchUp and Revit 2021 to 2026, Rhino 7) verified against vendor documentation on 18 July 2026. Host version support changes without notice; re-check before purchase.