What it costs to run
The whole platform runs on one small server, file storage with no traffic fees, a domain name and a mail service: about €15–20 a month in all, paid by the person who built it. Pages are cached, so a busy site costs almost nothing more than a quiet one. The aim is under five cents a month for each site in use.
If the cost ever outgrows that, the answer will be tighter limits or a tip jar you can ignore, never a paywall.
What you will not find
- No ads on your site, and none in front of your readers.
- No paid plan, no trial, no premium themes and no upsell. Every site gets every theme and every feature.
- No card at signup, because there is nothing to charge.
The one thing it asks
Your site’s footer says “Built with Draft Margin”, with a link here. That badge is how other authors find the platform, and it is all the platform asks. Beside it are two plain links every site carries: the privacy policy that covers your Members, and a way for anyone to report the site.
Leaving is one button
“Export my site”, in your site’s settings, emails you a zip of everything: your books and chapters as Markdown, your settings as JSON, your Members as a spreadsheet, and every image and file you uploaded. You can export once a day, any day, for as long as your site exists. Your writing is never locked in.
If it ever closes
If the platform shuts down, every author gets six months’ notice by email, and the export keeps working until the end. It is written here so you can hold it to that.
Safety limits, in plain words
Free hosting attracts spammers, so every site has limits. They are generous for an author, useless to a spam farm, and the same for everyone. Reach one and you will be told so; email [email protected] and it will be raised.
- One site for each account.
- 50 books on a site.
- 100 chapters in a book.
- 200 KB for one chapter, which is about 30,000 words.
- 20 pages, besides your books and posts.
- 5,000 Members.
- The last 1,000 contact-form messages, besides the copy of each in your email.
- 100 MB of images in all, and 4 MB for one image.
- 20 MB for one PDF or ePub you offer as a download.
- 10 MB for one Word manuscript you import.
Your readers are yours
Your Members list belongs to you: download it whenever you like. The platform sends your Members the sign-in links they ask for and nothing else: no newsletters, no offers, nothing of its own.
People who visit your site get no cookies, and nothing tracks them; the platform counts visits each day as plain numbers. Members sign in, so what they read is counted for you: which chapters they opened and finished. Who read what is forgotten after 90 days, and only the totals stay.
What gets taken down
Spam, scams and phishing; pretending to be someone else; someone else’s writing or images; illegal or harmful content. A site doing any of these is suspended: every address shows a holding page, and its author sees the reason on signing in. Links in what authors write are marked so search engines ignore them, which leaves spammers nothing to gain.
A site nobody looks after is cleared away too. If nobody signs in for a year and nothing on the site is published, the author gets an email, and the account is deleted 30 days later unless they sign in. A site with published books, posts or pages is never deleted for being quiet.
Still to come
Your own domain name, and that will be free too. Until then each site lives at yourname.draftmargin.com.