I signed up with a lot of enthusiasm for a long subscription (5 years) to write.as on 28 August, 2022. As much as I love the interface and setup, unfortunately it is unusable for me in its present form.
My use case is long-form writing with a fair bit of LaTeX content. I prefer to write in Markdown, and have it published straight into its final form. Sadly, after spending a lot of time experimenting with write.as; I could not get the LaTeX bit to work smoothly: a lot of the math content had to be escaped manually or by script and the rendering behaviour turned out to be generally inconsistent.
It’s a pity since most other things that I cared about during the setup phase (e.g, Fathom and Hyvor integration) worked out pretty well… I suppose I really should have checked this before jumping the gun: I can’t remember if perhaps the mathjax feature was only available on upgrade (?)
I should have also perhaps canceled more promptly and sent a refund request sooner rather than later. However, I pinged support@write.as two months in - first on Oct 19, 2022, and then followed up on Oct 24 2022; Oct 28, 2022; and Nov 5, 2022. I haven’t had a single acknowledgement, and I can only assume that these communications did not go through? I had generally given up, but stumbled on the forum now - I sent a private message to @support but I can’t seem to locate it anywhere now.
To summarize, I am two months in on a 5-year long subscription. I canceled back in October because of the reasons mentioned above. I believe the pro-rata refund request is reasonable, and all I am looking for at the moment is some acknowledgement that you’ve had a chance to consider it.
Hi @neeldhara, so sorry for not getting back to you. And sorry the product didn’t fit your needs.
Unfortunately I can’t do refunds on our 5-year plan, especially after two months. We’re a small business, and when someone pays for our service, we use that revenue to operate it every day – we can’t hold it like a bank, in case people want it back months down the road. But we have shorter payment options (monthly and yearly) plus a completely free trial for this exact purpose – so people can try the product and only commit for a period of time that fits them best.
Again, sorry this wasn’t a good fit. Regarding MathJax, as mentioned on the Pricing page it’s actually included in the Free tier – e.g. if you did a free Pro trial and simply didn’t upgrade. But maybe Write.as can be useful to you in some other way before your subscription expires in 5 years, or you could consider this a vote of support for a platform you were initially interested in.
Hope you understand, and let me know if I can help with anything else.
Hi @matt - thanks for acknowledging my request. I do (mostly) understand your response, but I have to confess that I’m slightly disappointed since I originally made a refund request roughly within two months of signing up… further, as for “we can’t hold it like a bank, in case people want it back months down the road” - indeed, that’s why it was a pro-rata refund request in the first place, I am not looking for a refund on the time I’d used up on the plan. Entirely possible I’m missing some part of the explanation here, in which case, never mind.
Re: the shorter trials and/or the availability of MathJax on the free tier, I suppose what happened was that most things worked well when I was trying things out, and the issues I faced only became apparent on more complex posts after I’d signed up. I think it’s fair for you to suggest that I should have tried out everything first. The reason I did not sign up for the shorter plans is because the longer one was the better deal.
I wish you’d suggested a equal-valued coupon that I could pass on to a friend after shutting down my account: this does not affect your revenue model but makes for a better use of the funds invested. I have to confess that the experience I had overall has dampened my enthusiasm for the platform and I won’t be able to recommend the product with the excitement that I had when I signed up.
Of course, I wish you and the team the best, and please be assured that I have no intention of pursuing this discussion further.