Publish once. Own everything.

Before you trust a tool with your site, there are two questions worth asking. Most tools answer the first one happily, and quietly hope you never get round to the second.

The first one is easy. Can it actually publish to where my site already lives? The second is quieter, and it matters more. If I ever want to leave, can I take everything with me?

A tool that fails the first is a demo. It produces work that lives in its own walled garden and never reaches your real audience. A tool that passes the first and fails the second is worse, because it gets your content onto your site and then makes sure it can never come back out in one piece. You build for a year, and the day you want to move you find your archive is being held hostage. We built Mastheads to pass both, on purpose.

Meeting you where you already publish

You shouldn't have to move your whole operation to use something new. So Mastheads connects to where your publication already is, and it connects properly. Not a flaky "supports everything" checkbox, but a handful of deep, real integrations that actually behave:

• WordPress.org. The WordPress you run yourself, through its official interface and a scoped, revocable password. Nothing more invasive than that.
• WordPress.com. Connected securely with a click, no fiddling.
• Ghost. Through its proper admin interface, down to the small, fussy details, like rendering the required transparency label in a way Ghost's editor won't quietly strip out.
• Just the articles. If you'd rather not run a content system at all, take the finished drafts - the article, the image, the metadata, the transparency label - and use them anywhere.

You can even route different sections of one publication to different places. Markets go to one home, lifestyle to another, each mapped to the right category on the far side. One newsroom, publishing wherever each part of it belongs.

There's an honest line worth knowing. We deliver the finished article - the structured data, the transparency label styled correctly, the image, the metadata - cleanly into your WordPress or Ghost. From there, your theme controls how it looks. Knowing where that boundary falls is the difference between a pleasant setup and a puzzled one.

Your leverage as a customer is that you can leave, and your content leaves with you, intact.

The part that proves it's yours

Then there's the question the lock-in tools never volunteer. Getting out.

Your content is yours, and the only way to actually mean that is to make leaving easy. So at any time, with one click, you can export your entire archive, or any single publication, as one file. Inside it are native import files for the platforms people actually use, WordPress and Ghost, plus clean Markdown, HTML, full metadata, and the images. Real files that drop straight into the system of your choice, not a raw spreadsheet you'd have to wrestle into shape. It's self-serve. You don't file a request or wait on anyone. And it stays available even after you stop paying.

That last line is a quiet thing in a market built on making you stay. Your leverage as a customer was never a promise that you'll be happy with us. It's the standing ability to walk, with everything, the day you decide to. A tool confident enough to hand you the exit has to keep earning the relationship, which is exactly the kind you want.

If you run sites for clients, it's also a sales asset you can say out loud. Your archive is portable, and I can prove it. That makes you easier to hire, because nobody is signing up to be trapped.

Owning your content isn't a feature we bolted on at the end. It's the principle the whole thing is arranged around. Publish once, wherever you already are. Own everything, forever, including the right to take it and go.