I've built one of these before. Different name, same category. And the single most common piece of feedback — the one that showed up in support tickets, in reviews, in DMs — was some version of: "I have one essay. I don't want a subscription. Why are you making me sign up for a monthly plan I'll forget to cancel?"
They were right. So this time we built the plan they were asking for.
Subscriptions assume a relationship you might not want
The default SaaS move is to make monthly the only real option and hope you forget to cancel. It works, in the cynical sense that it makes money. It also generates a specific kind of resentment — the "I got charged again for a thing I used once in March" feeling — that follows a brand around forever.
I don't want to run that business. A student with one paper due Thursday is not a lifetime-value spreadsheet cell. They're a person with a specific, temporary need, and the honest product for that need is a plan that starts and stops with the crisis.
The $7.99 deadline week
So there's a weekly plan. $7.99, 25,000 words, everything you need to check a paper and fix it. It exists explicitly for the "one paper, one week" case. No monthly ambush.
There's still a monthly plan ($14.99, 60k words, plus WriteLikeMe) for people who write and check often, and an annual plan ($99/year, which is a real discount and not a fake one) for people who've decided this is part of their toolkit. And there's the $0.99 three-day trial, which converts to monthly unless you cancel — but cancelling is two clicks inside the app, not an email to support and a prayer.
Honesty as a pricing strategy
Here's the bet: being straight about cancellation, offering the small plan people actually want, and pricing everything at what it's honestly worth — that builds more durable revenue than a clever cancellation maze ever could.
Maybe that's naive. I've decided I'd rather find out than run the maze.