sitemd.cc

Build Modes

sitemd has two modes: trial (unactivated) for free localhost development and activated for deployable builds. Trial gives you the full experience to evaluate the product. Activated requires a paid account and produces clean, standalone HTML output.

Trial (unactivated)

Trial mode is active when the site has not been activated. It's the default for new projects.

What you get:

What's different from activated:

No authentication required. You don't need a sitemd account to use trial mode.

Activated

A site is activated after running site activation. Activation permanently locks your site's identity fingerprint and consumes one site slot on your account.

This requires a paid sitemd account. Run sitemd auth login to authenticate. Every build and deploy calls the sitemd API to verify your site identity — network access is required.

What you get:

All features work in both modes

Every feature works identically in trial and activated. The dev server renders everything — there are no placeholder cards or degraded features during local development.

Feature What it includes
SEO OG tags, canonical URLs, Twitter cards, JSON-LD structured data
OG image generation Satori/Sharp rendering of per-page open graph images
Forms Webhook submission, field types, multi-page forms, conditional logic, honeypot anti-spam
Analytics Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Simple Analytics, PostHog, Matomo, GTM, ad pixels
User auth 5 provider adapters: custom API, Supabase, Firebase, Clerk, Auth0
Dynamic data 4 provider adapters: Supabase, Firebase, Airtable, REST API
User-type gating Role-based access control for pages and inline sections
Image optimization Build-time resize, compression, WebP generation, <picture> tag injection
Media hosting R2/S3 CDN sync at build time, HTML /media/ URL rewriting to CDN prefix
Card auto-images Auto-generated gradient/illustrated card images
Deploy Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages upload integrations
Badge removal Option to hide the "built with sitemd.cc" footer badge (shown by default, even when activated)
Email templates Transactional email compilation

Activated-only outputs

These files are only written to disk during activated builds (sitemd build or sitemd deploy):

The features that generate these outputs (SEO, feeds, email) still render in the dev server — they just don't produce standalone files until you activate.

Site slots

Site slots control how many sites you can activate. See Deploy for the full breakdown.

Quick summary:

How modules work

All feature code is bundled with the sitemd binary — nothing is fetched from the API at build time. The binary contains the full engine: form builder, data connectors, SEO generator, analytics injection, auth runtime, deploy targets, and image processing.

CI environments

For non-interactive builds in CI, set SITEMD_TOKEN as an environment variable:

export SITEMD_TOKEN=sk_abc123...
sitemd deploy

Generate an API key with sitemd auth api-key. See CLI Config for the full list of environment variables.

Graceful fallback

If a build can't proceed (no auth, no slots, or API unreachable), it falls back to trial mode instead of failing. You'll see a message like:

No available site slots — building in trial mode (unactivated).
Purchase additional sites at https://sitemd.cc/add-ons

You can keep working locally. Buying more slots or authenticating unlocks activated output.