Commerce Beacon has shipped a new app. PlainMark Editor is a Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it is on the App Store now for ninety-nine cents.

It is the smallest thing we have ever released, and it is the one that best explains how we work.

What it is

A Markdown editor with one unusual property: it never shows you the syntax under your cursor.

Almost every Markdown editor reveals the raw markers on whichever line you are working on. Put your cursor on a heading and the hash appears; the words shift right to make room. Move away and everything slides back. It is a deliberate design choice, and a defensible one — but it means the page rearranges itself while you are trying to think.

PlainMark Editor does not do that, and structurally cannot: the code that applies styling is never given the cursor position, so it has nothing to reveal.

The full technical write-up, including the function signature that makes the claim true, lives on the product site: the WYSIWYG Markdown editor that never shows you its syntax.

Why a services company ships its own products

Most of what Commerce Beacon does is build software for other people. That work is on the projects page, and the platform we sell is Beacon.

Client work has one structural problem as evidence: you usually cannot show it. NDAs, internal tools, half-finished migrations. "Trust us, we shipped it" is not proof of anything.

Products we own are the part of the portfolio anyone can go and inspect. You can download PlainMark Editor for a dollar and form your own opinion about whether the people who made it can build software. That is a considerably better argument than a case study we wrote about ourselves.

What it deliberately does not do

  • No tables, footnotes or math.
  • No sync, no account, nothing stored on your behalf.
  • Requires macOS 26, iOS 26 or iPadOS 26. We would rather scope something narrow and finish it than ship a broad thing that is 70 percent done. That instinct is the same one we bring to client work, and it is the actual reason this post exists.

If you are evaluating us

The question worth asking a development partner is not whether they can build what you described. It is whether they will tell you which parts to cut.

PlainMark Editor is a small, public, checkable example of that answer. If you are weighing whether to build something custom or assemble it from existing tools, we have written about build vs buy, and you can see how we approach custom software development.

Or just go and try the app.