How do I protect my master templates?

Let embed users work from your master templates and save their own copies, leaving the originals untouched.

Published Aug 29, 2026

Share master templates with your embed users and let them build from those masters without ever changing them. Each user gets their own copy, and the master stays exactly as you designed it. You design the blueprint, your users fill it in.

How It Works#

A protected workspace template never opens for editing in place. Opening one loads its content into a fresh, unsaved template named <original name> (Copy), and the first save writes that copy into the user's own library. The master is left alone, and the next user opening it gets a clean copy too.

The copy happens when the template is opened, not when it is saved. So a user can never be one autosave away from overwriting your master.

Turning It On#

Three settings in your embed dashboard work together:

Setting	Why it's needed
Enable Per-User Data & Templates	Gives each user a private library for their copies to land in
Show All Workspace Templates	Lets users see the masters in the first place
Prevent Workspace Template Overriding	Turns on the copy-on-open behaviour

The third toggle stays disabled until the first two are on, and turning either of them off switches it back off. See Per-User Data for setting up the userId parameter.

Per-user data is available on supported plans only. Without it, workspace templates are shared and editable by everyone using the embed.

Users then see two tabs: My Templates, their own work, fully editable, and Workspace Templates, your masters, opening as copies. A user's own templates are never protected, so once a copy is in their library they can keep editing and re-saving it normally.

Locking Parts of the Master#

Copy-on-open protects the master itself. To keep parts of the design fixed inside every copy, lock those layers before you share the template: select the layer, open the Layers panel in the styling sidebar, and click the lock icon. A locked layer can't be selected, dragged or resized on the canvas, so a logo or a brand bar stays put while the text and images around it stay editable.

A lock is a guardrail, not a permission. A user can unlock the layer again from the Layers panel. To make locks effectively fixed, also hide the styling sidebar with ?hide=stylesSidebar, which removes the only route to the unlock control. See Appearance.

Enforcement#

Protection is enforced on the server from your saved embed settings, not from anything the browser sends. Writing a workspace template directly through the API while protection is on is rejected:

JSON

{
  "error": "This template can't be overwritten. Save it as a new template instead."
}

The same check covers per-user templates in both directions: one embed user can never read or write another user's copy, and no embed can touch a template in a different workspace.

Important Notes#

A copy does not keep a reference back to its master, so editing a master does not update copies already made. It only changes what future copies start from
Users can rename and delete their own copies if those permissions are on, but never your masters
Copies are ordinary per-user templates, so the Studio Templates API returns them by passing embedId and embedUserId together. See Per-User Data

Per-User Data: give each user a private template library
Per-User Brand Assets: scope colors, images, fonts, videos and audio to one user
Appearance: hide editor sections, including the styling sidebar

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How do I scope brand assets to one user?

How do users export from the embed?

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