Bakspace
Write it all without losing the plot.
- Designed and built end to end, our own product
- Versioned binder, plain-file format, Word, EPUB and PDF export
- macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a web app
- October 2026, US$29 once
The client
This one is us. We wanted to write more long-form: essays, a book or two, the kind of thing that takes months. Every time we sat down to start, we got trapped looking for the tool instead. We wanted something sleek and beautiful that did not lock the work into a format, and that we could keep improving as we went. Nothing fit, so we built it.
The challenge
Long-form writing tools have drifted toward complexity and lock-in. The good ones keep your manuscript in a database only they can read. The simple ones lose the research, the versions and the structure that a book needs.
Bakspace had to hold a whole project, the manuscript and the research around it, keep every version without a writer ever thinking about it, run on macOS, Windows and Linux, and export a finished Word, EPUB or PDF at the end. And if Bakspace disappeared tomorrow, the book had to still be there, readable in anything.
How we worked
Bakspace is what we make when we are the client, so it gets the same rules as a client build: the file format was specified before the editor was written, and every decision that is expensive to change later was made first.
- Files first
- A project is a folder on disk. Every document is stored as editor JSON with a Markdown copy regenerated beside it, so the book is always readable without the app. Data loss is the only unrecoverable failure, so every write to disk goes through one written protocol.
- Every version kept
- Bakspace runs its own content-addressed snapshot store rather than git. A writer never sees a commit, a branch or a merge conflict, and never loses a sentence they cut on a bad day.
- One app, three operating systems and the browser
- The desktop app is a thin Electron shell around the same React tree the web app runs. Lint rules enforce the boundary: browser code can never import Node, so the renderer stays locked down and the app still compiles in five years.
- A licence that works offline
- One payment, US$29, through Paddle as merchant of record. The licence is activated online once and verified offline afterwards with an Ed25519 signature, so the app never has to phone home to let you write.
- Cloud as an option, never a dependency
- Backups are push-only, immutable snapshots. Sign-in is a magic link. A project is local or cloud, never both, so there are never two writable copies of your book.
- Sixty seconds to writing
- No tour, no wizard, no empty state that needs reading. Light and dark mode from the first component, focus mode and typewriter scrolling that stay out of the way.
The outcome
Bakspace launches in October 2026 on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a web app alongside. One licence, no subscription for the app itself, every update included.
It is a small, opinionated product, and it holds us to the standard we hold client work to: it has to work, and it has to be worth existing.