PeakZebra is both the company name and the product name. Prior to introducing the product, PeakZebra has been churning out custom-coded WordPress blocks since 2020. PeakZebra is based just outside Philadelphia and is proud to be well dug in to the Open Source Software world. The company is run by founder Robert Richardson.
Lord knows there are other options out there for running a newsletter. But in one way or another, all the other options make it hard for you to take your newsletter somewhere else. That means that if they suddenly have policies you can’t live with or the rates are raised through the roof, there are inherent barriers to using some other service or system. Even Ghost, an open source platform, has barriers inhibiting your departure. There aren’t other Ghost providers, for one thing. You can run your own Ghost installation–and that’s a fantastic thing–but really now, do you know anything about running Ghost yourself?
With PeakZebra you are running on a highly curated installation of WordPress, but at the end of the day, you’re running on WordPress. It’s the most widely used Content Management System in the world. It runs on over 43% of the websites on the internet (whether they are explicitly content-management sites or not). And there are a fantastic array of hosting company options for running a WordPress site if you decide to move for whatever reason. There are armies of designers and developers focusing on WordPress as well. You’ll never feel abandoned or alone–who doesn’t want that?
If you let your license with PeakZebra lapse, you’ll no longer have access to our tools and interface, but the setup is such that any reasonably skilled WordPress developer should have no trouble making further modifications. With PeakZebra, we have to continue earning your support because, ultimately, you’ve got other options.
WordPress is by far the most-used software for running websites across the internet, with some 43% of the global share of sites. And it’s free. And you can learn lots more about it at WordPress.org.
Short answer: no. We’re all about adding a continuous stream of improvements and then providing support for them. Support, alas, costs money. We’re just ridiculously affordable, though.
Not just tables, no. This is part of what differentiates it from options like Google Sheets or Airtable (or, to a lesser degree, Notion). PeakZebra has form pages that look like real applications. It can enforce specific workflows if you want. And you can get it customized to do just about anything you might need.
Glad you asked. PeakZebra software is secure as long as the WordPress installation you’re running your site on is secure. PeakZebra does all the right things when it comes to verifying and cleaning up user input so that it can’t do malicious things. We do smart things to provide guardrails for site owners who decide to write code to process their form data in customized ways. And interactions between fields, forms, and the server all use WordPress “nonces” to ensure that only the current user and session can submit a form.
Straight out of the box, WordPress is pretty darned secure, but there are lots of things that can be done to really harden a site. It’s outside the scope of this FAQ, but there are lots of guides online for this.