Pinegrow vs Etch Studio: A Licence You Can Keep Forever
Pinegrow has been editing plain HTML and CSS since 2014, and it sells a one-time licence. Etch Studio says it never will.
Etch Studio costs $590 a year on the annual plan, or $708 if you pay monthly. Its pricing FAQ says there “won’t be a lifetime deal”.
Pinegrow has one. Pinegrow’s homepage says a one-time licence lets you “use the current version forever”, with a year of free updates included. After that you can renew for half the price of a new licence.
Buy it once, stop paying, and it still opens.
It’s been around
Pinegrow has been “developed since 2014”. It’s a desktop editor for Mac, Windows and Linux.
That matters more than it should. I’d rather buy from a tool with a twelve-year track record than pay a yearly fee for a roadmap.
Your files, not its format
Pinegrow edits ordinary HTML and CSS. Its homepage says: “Everything stays in standard files you own. No lock-in.” The FAQ says you’re “not locked into a proprietary file format”.
It has two-way sync with VS Code and other code editors. So you can open the same project in your editor, commit it to Git and hand it to an agent.
It does add its own touches. Its component feature turns an element into a reusable block you update in one step, and some of its tools add data-* attributes to your markup. The FAQ says those don’t make the files incompatible with other editors.
AI on the side, not in charge
Pinegrow’s AI uses its own credits or your API key, from several providers. It works “side by side with coding agents like Codex and Claude Code”.
The AI docs say the assistant costs nothing extra. You still pay for the model, through credits or your key.
Pinegrow doesn’t oversell its AI, and I like that. The docs say a generated page “will not get any design awards, but it can serve as a starting point.”
Its homepage asks why you’d use Pinegrow if an AI agent is building your site. The answer: “someone still has to check the result and fix the details.”
That’s the honest version of AI plus a visual editor.
The framework stuff
It styles Tailwind projects visually, turns Bootstrap classes into controls, edits CSS variables, SASS and LESS live, and shows several device sizes at once.
Pinegrow doesn’t host anything. You publish the files wherever you like.
The trade-offs
The one-time licence isn’t the whole product. Pinegrow says Interactions “are not available with one time payment”, and the Shop Builder add-on isn’t either.
On a subscription, stop paying and the editor goes. The FAQ says “you won’t be able to continue using Pinegrow after your subscription ends.” Your files stay. Pinegrow’s tools, like updating every copy of a component in one step, don’t.
And it’s commercial software with its own EULA. Open source it isn’t.
Who should pick it
You write HTML and CSS, you want a visual editor on top of your own files, and you’d rather pay once than rent.
Etch’s pre-sale buyers paid once too, under a no-refunds policy. Here’s what they’re still waiting for. Pinegrow’s one-time licence buys an editor that already works.