Every hosted publishing service has an "export" feature. That's not a gift — it's an admission.
What it's admitting, out loud, is that your writing lives somewhere you can't reach by default. The export button is an escape hatch you have to go ask for, and the file you get back is never quite what you started with. Little details drop out. Images get rehosted. Custom formatting gets flattened.
Project Broadsheet takes the opposite approach. Your writing is plain text files in a folder on your computer. There's no export, because there's nothing to export from — the files on your laptop are the files your readers see.
What that gets you
- A full history, for free. Every edit is recorded. Nothing is ever really lost.
- Moving away is trivial. Want to try something else? Copy the folder.
- Real collaboration. Writers and editors can review each other's changes line by line.
- No "export" needed. You already have everything, all the time.
The catch
Working this way takes a small amount of getting used to. If it's new, there's a short climb. The browser-based editor is a way around that if you'd rather not work in files at all.
But the climb is a one-off. A subscription to a hosted service is a bill that repeats every month, for as long as you keep the lights on.