Closing new Free registrations tonight

Announcements
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We’ll be closing new Free account registrations tonight, at midnight UTC, June 11, 2025. More info on our Mastodon account:

After this, for a completely free blog, you’ll need to either:

Of course, you can also upgrade to a paid Write.as Pro plan to support our small business, if you enjoy it! :slightly_smiling_face:

Rationale

As mentioned in that thread, this change is largely driven by the large amount of spam, SEO content, affiliate blogs, and automated accounts we’ve been seeing lately.

I’ve started building in some new features to make moderation of these accounts easier, but the flood of junk is still overwhelming, so I need to make this change to slow that a bit and make sure our service isn’t overrun by spammers (which would ruin it for the rest of us).

As part of that, I’ve added a new Account Status page, which will be most relevant to our current Free users. It will explain any moderation decisions, including automated silencing, and in the future provide a much smoother way to appeal moderation decisions.

Please feel free to share feedback here, if you have any!

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The quality of the posts on Read Write.as has improved since closing free registrations and so far I’m not seeing SEO slop or marketing stuff.

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Glad to hear it! I’ve caught a few there since closing Free accounts (maybe 4), and have been taking manual action on them as they appear. But yeah more widely, there’s been an enormous drop in spammy-looking account registrations.

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Hello! New user here, I was wondering if this will be a permanent thing?
I’d like to open a simple blog about my research, so I wanted try the free tier for a while to see if it works out (before potentially upgrading to a paid tier) ^^
Was just wondering if the free option will become available again in the future or there are currently no plans for it (especially since I noticed this update is still pretty recent). Thanks!!

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Hey, welcome! We’ll likely open them up again at some point in the future, but there’s no timeline on that right now.

However, there’s one way to get a permanently-free account right now: if you upgrade to Pro for any period of time (e.g. one month) and then cancel your Pro subscription (i.e. stop auto-renew), then once that period runs out, your account will automatically fall back to a Free account. We don’t automatically delete accounts or anything like that, so this would be one way to do it. Then of course if you ever want to upgrade again in the future, you can do that at any time.

If you have any questions or need help with anything, just let me know!