Your Trial Has Ended: Let Us Rebuild the Ship (Not)

2/8/2026

I recently fell down a perfectly respectable rabbit hole.

It started innocently enough. An editor license renewal. A number that was higher than my tolerance. A sudden urge to tear out TinyMCE, replace it with something noble and free, and reclaim editorial sovereignty in the name of principle.

Cue montage.

Summernote appeared. jQuery dusted itself off. CSS selectors were interrogated. Dark mode fought back. Fonts went missing. Icons staged a quiet rebellion. Next.js reminded me that it does not care about my feelings.

At some point, the editor actually rendered. That is always the dangerous moment. That is when the brain starts saying things like:

“Well, while I am here, I could just make this perfect.”

That is how projects escape orbit.

Then, right on schedule, the bridge commander walked in.

“Why are we doing this?”

Good question.

So I stopped. I backed up. I looked at the actual numbers instead of the emotional ones.

TinyMCE free tier allows 1000 editor loads per month.

This site has exactly one author. Me.

I would have to load the editor roughly 30 times per day, every day, without fail, to hit that limit. That is not writing. That is a cry for help.

Then I remembered the most important detail.

I do not even write in the editor.

I write outside the editor. I think outside the editor. I structure the piece, beat it into shape, and only then do I paste it in. The editor is not my workshop. It is a clipboard with a save button.

My usage of TinyMCE is basically:

headings
bold and italic
center alignment
image upload

That is it. No cloud storage. No hosted images. No drafts living anywhere but my own database. TinyMCE is just a JavaScript file that happens to load from someone else’s CDN.

At that point, the panic evaporated.

This was not a licensing crisis. This was a misalignment between perceived risk and actual usage.

So the verdict is simple.

The trial has ended.
The ship remains intact.
The hull breach was theoretical.

TinyMCE free stays, for now.

Not because it is perfect. Not because I trust vendors. But because the math says it is fine, and the editor should never be the most interesting thing about a site like this.

And if that ever changes, I already know the escape routes.

Sometimes the most responsible engineering decision is not to rebuild the ship mid-flight, but to sit back down at the console and keep navigating.

Back to writing.