It is free, and there is nothing to unlock later. Every button in the editor works on your first visit and on your thousandth. Unlimited documents of any length, live preview, every export route, and files that come out with no branding stamped on them. Nobody asks for an email address or a card number, because the product has no account system at all.
The reason is architectural rather than generous. Your Markdown is parsed and rendered inside your own tab. A visitor who writes a 20,000-word manuscript here costs us exactly what a visitor who writes nothing costs us: one download of a static page. No per-user expense means no per-user bill. The real trade-offs are about accounts and sync, and they are spelled out below.
At a glance
| Price | Free, and there is no paid tier |
|---|---|
| Account required | None - There is no sign-up at all |
| Usage limit | No document, size or export caps |
| Export watermark | None on .md, .html or printed PDF |
| Funding model | Static hosting, no per-user server cost |
Why free is actually sustainable here
- Nothing is held back for a paid tier, because there is no paid tier to hold it back for.
- Your text never reaches our machines, so there is no per-user cost to recover from you.
- Exported files carry no watermark, no credit line and no hidden link home.
- What you give up is sync, version history and a support desk that can recover a file.
- One habit removes the downside: press Ctrl+S and keep the
.mdfile yourself.
Scepticism about free tools is healthy. Usually it means your data is the product, or the free tier is bait for an upsell. Neither applies here, and the reason is structural.
The editor has no server-side workload. Typing, parsing and preview all run in your tab, through the marked.js library, cleaned by DOMPurify before anything is displayed. Serving you the editor costs what serving a static page costs, which is close to nothing per visitor.
What the free editor actually includes
Every feature in the editor
Free here means the whole product, not a teaser. The editor gives you:
- Live preview side by side with your text
- Full GitHub Flavored Markdown, tables and task lists included
- A formatting toolbar with keyboard shortcuts
- Autosave to your browser, plus word and character counts that handle Chinese correctly
- A full-page writing mode for long sessions
- Five ways out: download
.md, download a styled.htmlfile, copy rendered HTML, copy raw Markdown, print to PDF
Every guide on the site
The interface runs in English and Traditional Chinese. The learning material is free on the same terms: no article count, no paywalled section, no newsletter gate. The complete guide, the cheat sheet and the tables guide are simply open.
How free tools usually pay for themselves
Why editors with accounts have to charge
Every user of a cloud editor means database rows, storage, sync infrastructure, password resets, abuse handling and support. Those costs grow with usage, so a paid tier becomes inevitable. Keeping everything in the browser opts out of that curve completely. The site pays for itself as a learning resource, and the editor is the practice ground attached to it.
The five usual business models
There are only about five ways a free tool pays for itself. Walking through all of them is quicker than arguing in the abstract.
| Usual way a free tool pays for itself | What it costs you | Used here |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier that upsells to Pro | Useful features withheld until you pay | No, there is no Pro tier |
| Advertising on the page | Attention, plus third-party tracking | No, there are no ad slots |
| Account required before you can save | Your email address and a profile | No, there is no sign-up |
| Watermarked or capped exports | Branding stamped onto your work | No, exports are unbranded |
| Documents stored and mined | Your text living on someone's server | No, nothing is ever uploaded |
Check the last row yourself
That row is the one that matters for work material, and you do not have to take it on trust. Open your browser's developer tools. Watch the Network tab while you type. Nothing goes out carrying your text. Where your text is stored walks through the check step by step.
What a clean export looks like
What you write
"No watermark" is easy to claim, so here is the real output. Suppose you write this in the editor:
# Q3 summary
Revenue was **up 12%**.
- Taipei office: on target
- Remote team: still hiring
What the .html button gives you
You get one self-contained file. The readable typography rules sit inline, in a single <style> block:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Markdown document</title>
<style>body{max-width:760px;margin:2rem auto; ... }</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Q3 summary</h1>
<p>Revenue was <strong>up 12%</strong>.</p>
<ul>
<li>Taipei office: on target</li>
<li>Remote team: still hiring</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
The point is what is missing
- No tracking script and no analytics beacon
- No "created with" footer and no hidden link back to this site
- No external font or stylesheet request, so the file opens with no connection
You can email that file, commit it to a repository or host it anywhere. The .md download is plainer still. Byte for byte, it is the text you typed.
The honest trade-offs of no accounts
What you give up
No accounts is a feature with consequences. Because there is no login, there is none of this:
- No cloud sync. A draft saved in Chrome on your laptop will not appear in Safari on your phone.
- No version history. Autosave keeps the current text and nothing older.
- No shared document. A colleague cannot edit alongside you.
- No recovery desk. Nobody at this end holds a copy to restore.
The habit that makes it a non-issue
Drafts live in your browser's localStorage, so clearing site data or writing in a private window ends them. Where your text is stored has the full picture. When a document matters, press Ctrl+S, or Cmd+S on a Mac, and drop a .md file onto your own disk. That file is permanent, portable and yours.
When to pay for something else
Some workflows genuinely need multi-device sync, revision history or live collaboration. A paid tool is the right answer there, and no amount of free would close that gap. For writing, converting and learning Markdown, you will not hit a wall here that money would remove.
The one mistake that makes people distrust free tools
The week that ends badly
Nearly every bad experience with a local-first editor follows the same script, and pricing has nothing to do with it:
Mon Write the whole proposal in the editor tab
Tue Clear cookies and site data to fix an unrelated login
Tue Reopen the editor - The proposal is gone
Nothing failed there. Browser storage did exactly what the user told it to do.
The same week, three seconds better
Mon Write in the editor, press Ctrl+S to save document.md
Mon Move that file into your normal documents folder
Tue Clear whatever you like - The file is untouched
Tip: Rename the download as you save it, so the folder still makes sense a year later. If you already keep real files in git or a synced folder, put your Markdown there too. It is plain text, so it diffs cleanly and never needs migrating. Writing somewhere with no signal? Whether the editor works offline has the pre-flight version.
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