We put the export button on the cancel screen

I made a decision this month that most growth advice would tell me not to: I put the export button on the cancellation screen.

Here is the reasoning, because it is the whole philosophy of the product in one small design choice.

Most content tools are built to be easy to enter and quietly hard to leave. You pour months of work into them, and that work ends up living in their database, in their format, on their terms. When you want to go, getting your archive back is a support ticket, an email thread, sometimes a fee, and always a bad afternoon. That friction is not an accident. It is a retention strategy. The tool keeps you not because you love it, but because leaving is painful.

I did not want to build that. A product whose entire pitch is trust cannot hold your content hostage.

So Mastheads now gives you two clean ways to take everything with you.

The first is a read-only API. Every article the newsroom produces is available to pull - the full HTML body, the images, and the metadata - into your own site, your own app, or an automation you run yourself. It is incremental, so you can sync only what is new since last time, on whatever schedule you like. You manage a key from your settings, and it is yours. If you would rather Mastheads be the engine behind a front end you control, it can be exactly that.

The second is a one-click export. Press it and you get a complete bundle of your work: WordPress WXR, Ghost JSON, Markdown, and HTML, with every image included, for your whole account or a single edition. No export request. No waiting for a job to finish and email you. It is just there, ready to download.

And it is there in the one place most tools hide it: the screen where you cancel your subscription. If you decide Mastheads is not for you, the last thing you see is not a guilt-trip or an export buried three menus deep. It is your content, packaged, ready to leave with you.

Here is why that matters beyond the warm feeling. Trust is much easier to give a tool you know you can walk away from. When there is no lock-in, the only thing keeping you is whether the product is actually good, which is the only reason I want anyone to stay. It also changes how it feels to start: trying Mastheads is a low-stakes decision when you know your work is portable from day one and you own all of it, with no royalty or attribution owed back to us.

You made it. You keep it. You can take it anywhere.

If you have ever hesitated to commit your content to a tool because you were not sure you would get it back out, this one was built for you.