About

plain started from a small frustration: publishing a few words to the web had somehow become complicated. To put up a simple site you were asked to pick a platform, make an account, learn a dashboard, and trust that all of it would still be there — and still be yours — in a few years.

It rarely was.

plain is a reaction to that. The idea is almost old-fashioned: your website should be a folder of files you can read, kept in version control you already understand, built into plain HTML that works everywhere. Nothing proprietary in the middle. Nothing new to log into.

What it is

• A build step that turns Markdown and a little JSON into a static website.
• A browser admin for people who would rather not touch Git — though underneath, it is only ever writing commits.
• One runtime dependency, and a core small enough to read in an afternoon.

What it isn't

• It isn't a platform. There is no plain.com account, no server we run for you, nothing that can be taken away.
• It isn't trying to do everything. Bigger needs are met with small plugins, or with a different tool entirely — and that is fine.
• It isn't clever. That is the point.

Made in the open

plain is open source, and built with itself — the site you are reading is a plain site. If it is useful to you, take a copy and make it yours.