A Pastebin That Renders Markdown
Classic paste sites are built for source code: paste text, pick a language, get highlighting. Give one a README and you get the raw characters — hashes, pipes and asterisks — instead of a document.
MarkdownBin treats markdown as the format rather than the payload.
Side by side
| Feature | MarkdownBin | Typical paste site |
|---|---|---|
| Renders markdownHeadings, tables and lists as formatting, not literal characters | Yes | No |
| Mermaid diagrams | Yes | No |
| Maths rendering | Yes | No |
| Syntax highlighting | Yes | Yes |
| Post without an account | Yes | Yes |
| End-to-end encryptionKey derived in your browser; server never receives the password | Yes | No |
| No advertising | Yes | Partial |
| Expiring pastesPlanned here; a standard feature on most paste sites | No | Yes |
| Edit after posting | No | Partial |
Generalised across common paste services as of July 2026; individual sites differ, and some offer features listed here as absent.
Raw text versus a document
A paste site shows you what you typed. That is the correct behaviour for a shell script, where every character matters and formatting would be corruption.
It is the wrong behaviour for prose. A markdown table pasted as raw text is a wall of pipes that a reader has to mentally parse. The same table rendered is something they can read at a glance. Once content is meant to be read rather than executed, rendering stops being decoration.
Password protection versus encryption
Several paste sites offer password-protected pastes. Worth understanding what that usually means: the content sits on the server in readable form, and the password controls who is served it. The operator can still read it, and so can anyone who reaches the database.
End-to-end encryption moves the boundary. Your password derives a key in your browser using PBKDF2, the content is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it leaves the page, and the server only ever stores ciphertext. There is no version of the content on the server that anyone can read — including us.
The tradeoff is real and worth stating: lose the password and the content is gone. There is no reset, because there is nothing to reset with.
Where paste sites still win
Expiry is the big one. Most paste services let you set content to vanish after an hour, a day or a month; that is on the roadmap here but not built yet, so today a paste persists until it is deleted.
Established services also have scale behind them — API access, integrations, and years of accumulated tooling. If you need a paste API wired into a bot, that is not this.
Try it
Paste markdown, get a rendered page at a shareable link. Add a password if it should stay private. No account and no ads.