mdash as a service

3 min read Original article ↗

Horizontal punctuation, delivered at scale.

Stop hand-crafting dashes in-house. mdash as a service delivers hyphens, en dashes, em dashes and the rare two- and three-em dash through a globally distributed* API—each one mined, certified and tracked on the Dashchain.

Get a dash

*one server

Trusted by Hyphenated-Names LLC The Ranges Group (2019–2026) Em & Dash Partners ⸻ (name redacted)

The catalog

Five dashes, ethically sourced from the Unicode Consortium. Click a dash to have it provisioned, mined, certified and placed on your clipboard. We handle the enterprise contract for you.

Hyphen-minus free

U+002D · ≈⅓ em · -

The workhorse. Joins compound words, splits syllables, moonlights as a minus sign. Sourced from ASCII since 1963.

En dash free

U+2013 · ½ em · –

For ranges (9–5), connections (London–Paris) and people who have read at least one style guide.

Em dash pro

U+2014 · 1 em · —

The dramatic pause—now with a side effect: everybody assumes a language model wrote your text.

Two-em dash enterprise

U+2E3A · 2 em · ⸺

Marks missing letters, as in “Mr. H⸺”. Ideal for redacting the names of customers with overdue invoices.

Three-em dash enterprise

U+2E3B · 3 em · ⸻

Replaces a repeated author name in a bibliography. Three whole ems. Our flagship product.

Latest block

2d20244662451eea62faacf2b082a164a6debeb3cd26f2b7b2351a7e719a521e

DashCorrect™

Our AI-free, regex-powered typography engine finds every hyphen pretending to be a dash and replaces it with the real thing. Includes a complimentary estimate of how much your em dashes make you sound like a chatbot.

Corrected text appears here.

    Simple, transparent pricing

    Every plan costs nothing. Some plans just cost nothing more exclusively.

    Hobbyist

    $0 / month

    • Hyphens and en dashes
    • Community support (you, alone, reading this)
    • Every dash individually minted on the Dashchain

    30 requests/min · up to 10 dashes/request · latency: 400 ms of artisanal, hand-crafted latency

    Pro

    $0 / month (was $49)

    • Everything in Hobbyist
    • Em dashes — the good stuff
    • Up to 1,000 dashes per request
    • Priority email support (unmonitored)

    600 requests/min · up to 1000 dashes/request · latency: none, we removed the sleep() call

    Enterprise

    Contact sales (sales will say $0)

    • Everything in Pro
    • Two-em and three-em dashes
    • 99.999% dash-uptime SLA
    • SOC 2 Type Dash compliance
    • Custom invoices for $0.00, in triplicate

    6000 requests/min · up to 100000 dashes/request · latency: none, plus a Dedicated Dash Success Manager

    API

    RESTful, content-negotiated, Proof-of-Dash-secured. Plain text by default; ask for JSON, XML, CSV, HTML or SVG via Accept, ?format= or a file extension.

    # A hyphen, free, with artisanal latency
curl https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/hyphen

# Upgrade to Pro (price: $0)
KEY=$(curl -s -X POST https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/keys -d tier=pro)
curl -H "X-Dash-Key: $KEY" https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/em-dash

# Enterprise requires a sales call. It's quick.
KEY=$(curl -s -X POST https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/sales \
  -d name=Ada -d company=Acme | tail -1)
curl -H "X-Dash-Key: $KEY" "https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/3-em-dash?count=3"
    # Formats: json, xml, csv, html, svg
curl https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/en-dash.json
curl -H "Accept: image/svg+xml" https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/hyphen

# Dash Streaming™ (Server-Sent Events)
curl -N https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/dashes/en-dash/stream?interval=500ms

# DashCorrect™ and the Dashchain
curl --data-binary @essay.txt https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/fix?style=british
curl https://mdash.tsak.dev/v1/ledger/verify