The studio’s negative space
Five things this studio will not do.
Trust is also what you leave off the page. The five lines below are promises kept by absence — what isn’t in the contract, what isn’t loaded in the <head>, what isn’t hidden behind a sales call. If any of these stops being true, the changelog will say so before you do.
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Never — one
I will never lock you in.
Your domain is in your name. Your DNS is in your account. Your codebase ships to a Git repo you own. The day you decide to leave, you take everything — no proprietary CMS, no platform tax, no “migration package” line item. The exit ramp is part of the build.
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Never — two
I will never resell your data.
Your invoices, your covers, your prime cost, the email of the regular who left a one-star review — none of it gets aggregated, none of it gets brokered, none of it trains a model. The studio holds what the engagement letter names and nothing else. The proof is at /security/: nine claims, five tests you can run yourself.
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Never — three
I will never hide pricing behind a call.
Three site tiers, three productized offers, one care plan — ranges and inclusions are posted on /services/. If your project doesn’t fit a tier, the quote arrives in writing within two business days, with the math shown. You decide whether to book a call once you’ve seen the number.
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Never — four
I will never run a remarketing pixel on the library.
No Meta pixel. No Google Ads tag. No LinkedIn Insight. No third-party retargeting on any page that exists to teach — that’s articles, glossary, research, tools. Plausible is the only analytics that loads, it is cookieless, and as of Phase 3B the script is self-hosted from this domain (
/assets/p.js) with events proxied through/api/event— your browser never makes a request to a third-party analytics origin. Read an article in peace; nobody will follow you home. -
Never — five
I will never take work I can’t ship in the quoted window.
Two builds run at a time, no exceptions. If the calendar can’t carry your project, you hear so on day one — with a date you’d be next, or a referral to a peer studio that can. Better a polite “not yet” than a deadline missed. Operators run on calendars; the studio respects that.
What I will never charge for in the Menu Design Suite.
Operators ask whether the free tool is a teaser for the paid services. It isn’t. The free tool is the actual studio output, capped only by what one designer can hand-touch in a day. The list below is what stays free and complete, in writing, on the record:
- All 37 curated typeset themes — every cuisine, every paper format, no “premium tier” gate.
- Every accessibility variant: large-print 18pt PDF, high-contrast yellow-on-black, plain text + Markdown, SSML for AWS Polly / Google TTS / Azure Speech, Grade 1 Braille (BRF) for embossers, ESC/POS thermal-printer .bin.
- Allergen-key export across all five regulatory regimes (US-FDA-9, EU-FIC-14, UK-PPDS, CA, AU/NZ) and the auto-disclaimer footer it produces.
- Bilingual EN+ES UI and a side-by-side bilingual ZIP export.
- Print-vendor PDF (PDF/X-3-flavored, 0.125″ bleed, crop marks, sRGB OutputIntent, TrimBox + BleedBox) — this is the press-ready file, identical to what an operator would pay $249 for as a one-shot.
- Schema.org Menu JSON-LD for the operator’s website, plus the QR-menu HTML and the tablet-kiosk HTML — all self-contained, host-anywhere.
- Studio-handoff brief: when an operator does book Polish or Drop-In, the brief is auto-bundled (free), so they don’t pay for me to round-trip the obvious.
- Service-worker offline mode and PWA installable shell — ship a menu in the kitchen at 11pm with no internet.
The two paid services — Menu Polish ($249) and Menu Drop-In ($1,500) — are about my hands-on time, not feature unlocks. Polish is “take what you built and refine it”; Drop-In is “design the menu from scratch with you.” The free tool produces the same artifact shapes either way; the paid services produce the kind of refinement only a designer with 14 years on restaurant floors can add.
I don’t want a million users. I want to serve a few hundred restaurants well. That’s why this tool stays free, complete, and ad-less — and that’s why the paid services have a waitlist (capacity-capped to six polishes and one drop-in per week). Constrained-by-design capacity is the feature, not a bug.
When I do take a small fee — here’s exactly when, and what travels.
Menu Design Suite’s print-vendor mode shows three deeplinks — MOO, GotPrint, Vistaprint. If you click through and order, I earn a small per-conversion fee from that vendor. The only thing the deeplink carries is your intent (you wanted to print a menu); your file never uploads to us, and never to them through us. Same with their checkout: if you choose to upload your PDF on their site, that’s your transaction with them — we’re not in the loop.
I picked those three because each one solves a different real-restaurant need: MOO for premium stocks when the menu is a brand artifact, GotPrint for cost-sensitive print runs that need to ship, Vistaprint for paper variety + fast turnaround. None of the three pay for placement order; the operator-tone hint next to each link names the actual trade-off so you pick the right one for the job.
The links carry rel="sponsored" per Google’s convention so search engines see the relationship clearly, and they open in a new tab so you don’t lose your menu draft. If the fee ever stops being modest enough to be a footnote, this section gets rewritten and the changelog dates the change.
I will never run a print-shop ad above the editor itself. The deeplinks live only next to the press-ready PDF download — the place where they answer a real question (“OK, now where do I print this?”) instead of selling you something.
These five aren’t a manifesto. They’re the spec for a studio I’d hire. If a sixth shows up that’s worth keeping, it lands here, dated, and the changelog records the addition.
Spotted one I’m about to break? don@muntin.digital. Receipts on the wall, in writing, with my name on them.
Sister surfaces