When There's No More to Write

Periods of creative output can change over time. A day or week or year might be filled with words overflowing from your mind, while the next might only see a trickle. We might feel more social and public at one point, and more introspective and reclusive at another.

As a home for your writing, we think broadly about how your creative output changes over time, and how we can evolve and flow with it. From this long view, we know that we don’t need to bug you with “retention” emails after you’ve signed up; you’ll write when you want to. We know you you may want to take your work elsewhere (even just to keep a personal copy), so we make exporting your data a cinch. And we know you might not want to keep your work on the web anymore — so starting today, you can finally delete your Write.as account on your own.

This is, admittedly, a long-overdue feature. It’s not only important from the perspective of your personal freedom, but also from a privacy perspective — you should be able to completely erase the data we have about you at any time, without any friction.

Today, this feature is available to all Free users who aren't part of any Team. To permanently wipe out all traces of your account, head to your Account Settings page and scroll down to the aptly-titled “Incinerator” section, where you'll find the “Delete your account” option. Click that and follow the instructions there to erase your account.

Screenshot of the "Incinerator" section. It says "Delete your account. Permanently erase all your data, with no way to recover it."

As always, respect for your privacy and freedom was at the top of our minds when designing this feature. So you won’t face any resistance from us, including the industry-standard attempts to manipulate you, begging “Please don’t go!” Plus, as always, “delete” means delete — so once you confirm the action, your data is truly gone without any delay, and can’t be recovered.

With this feature, we hope more people will feel comfortable making Write.as their home for their writing, knowing they’ll never be held captive. It still only takes one click to export and move everything you’ve written on the platform, and with today’s changes, now you can freely delete your account as you please.

For Pro and Team users, expect to see this option on your account soon. For now, you can still get in touch with us to have your account deleted.

For WriteFreely users, you’ll find this feature in our next release, v0.13, coming out soon.


Thanks for reading! Though our updates on this blog are infrequent, we’re improving Write.as all the time. If you’d like to get our smaller, more frequent updates, read and subscribe to our What’s New on Write.as blog.

#updates #privacy #freedom