Frequently Asked Questions

I'm afraid of lock in. How am I protected?

The save format for Wysimark is markdown which is plain text. This means you can replace Wysimark with a textarea or another editor if you are unsatisfied with our software or service for any reason.

This is a strong incentive for us to provide the best WYSIWYG Markdown editor at a fair and reasonable price.

I'm afraid of image file lock in. How am I protected?

The URLs for all the images and files in your app can be found in the markdown that you store. The files can be transferred to any file storage service like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure Cloud Storage by reading the URLs and storing them elsewhere. This can be done without our permission.

We've created an open source npm package @portive/get-image-urls that can be used to get the image URLs from Markdown.

import { getImageUrls } from '@portive/get-image-urls'

const urls = getImageUrlsFromMarkdown(markdown)
// returns an array of strings

Since Wysimark saves as standard markdown, you can use this tool to get a list of all images and files and transfer them to another storage service.

Can you make this open source?

To fulfill our goal of a sustainable business with a way to guarantee ongoing supported quality software, we

Is the markdown data secure?

The markdown content in your editor is never sent outside your website. You can check this by opening the developer tools in your browser, opening the network tab and viewing what goes in and out of the browser.

This link describes how to check your network activity in Chrome:

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/network

How are the uploaded images secure?

The images in the editor are uploaded to Amazon S3 and given unguessable URL.

How am I protected if you go out of business?

We have contracted with a third-party code escrow service.

In the event that Portive is unable to support the software and services, you will be given the source code as well as an unlimited license to use the software.

Optionally, we may open source the software.

Will this slow down my app?

Wysimark does not affect initial load times.

A very small amount of code (about 5KB) is added to your app.

That code is used to lazy load the Editor:

• The Editor is loaded after the rest of your app

• A box representing the size and shape of the editor is displayed first so that when the editor does load, it will not cause your app layout to shift which looks unprofessional

• When the editor is finished loading, the content is quickly and smoothly faded in to look beautiful

• The editor is loaded through a CDN so for most use cases, the load time will be imperceptible. The compressed editor code is about 95KB meaning it's about the size of a small image.

• After the editor is loaded once, it is cached in your app and your end user will not experience any load time thereafter

If my business grows exponentially I don't want to get a huge bill. Do I have protections around this?

Yes, we cap the maximum licensing fee for self-hosting to $1000/month for unlimited usage in an app with the option to raise pricing in accordance with the inflation rate.

The purpose of the cap is to make licensing Wysimark a better option than building it yourself. If your business explodes, $1000/month is an order of magnitude less expensive than hiring a developer.