Why Sqwig

We built Sqwig because we needed it and it didn't exist.

A product we were building needed a rich text box. Nothing exotic: bold, italic, headings, lists, links, a clean paste from Word, and output that saves as sane HTML. A day of work, we figured.

Then we started looking.

Every option is a suite. Rich text arrives bundled with collaboration, comments, mentions, revision history, AI rewriting and a catalog of things that product was not going to touch. You pay for all of it, then you spend the week you saved in configuration turning most of it off.

And spellcheck? Not in the box. It is a separate license on top of the suite, and it deploys two ways: the vendor's servers see your users' text as they type, or you stand up their spelling service yourself and keep it running through every upgrade.

That project shipped the way they all do. We bought the suite, configured most of it away, and moved on. That was the spark behind Sqwig: its design, its pricing and its approach.

The gap stayed open. Nobody was selling a rich text box that arrived with spellcheck in it at a price a form field could justify, so we built one.

What we built

One thing, done properly: a rich text box with spellcheck in it.

The formatting people actually use, on by default: headings, fonts, bold and italic, lists, alignment, links, tables, images (you host them, we render them), find and replace, markdown in and out. No plugin registry, nothing to assemble. Paste from Word and Google Docs arrives clean instead of arriving as Word's markup, and getHTML() hands back semantic HTML you can store and load again. The output is the same on every plan.

The spellcheck runs on the device. A real dictionary compiled to WebAssembly, about 381KB over the wire. Your users' text stays in their browser. No API key, no service to call, no per-word meter. Open the network tab and watch: nothing goes out.

What that decides

Running the dictionary on the device is the one decision the rest of Sqwig follows from.

We cannot meter the editor, because there is nothing on our side to count. No charge for editor loads, or words checked, or seats, or developers. You license an application, and then you stop counting.

It also shortens the security, privacy and data governance reviews, which matter most if you ship to schools, clinics or law firms. There is nothing of your users' on our side to review. What each spellcheck option costs →

What we left out, on purpose

No collaboration. No comments or mentions. No revision history. No AI rewriting. No image hosting. No spellcheck in twenty languages, which would mean sending text to a server.

Those are decisions, not gaps. If you are building a publishing platform, buy the suite, and we would rather say so now than sell you a license you regret. If what you need is a text box that formats properly, catches typos, survives a paste from Word and behaves on a phone, that is the whole product.

What it costs, and why

$720 a year for one application. $8,000 flat, however many applications you run.

Free covers development, evaluation and non-commercial production, accepted with one line of configuration, with a small badge in the editor's footer. Flat and annual, one payment. Nothing auto-renews and nothing is metered.

The price is low deliberately, and it is not a discount. Suites bundle what an authoring platform needs and charge everyone for the bundle. We sell the part most applications actually need, priced so that adding it to one more product is not a business case. We would rather turn up in a thousand products than win one long negotiation.

And yes, Sqwig is spelled wrong on purpose. Our own spellcheck flags it.