anniversary

Today, February 2, marks 11 years since we officially launched Write.as! What started as a minimal, anonymous article publishing platform in 2015 has since grown into an ecosystem of apps, a community of writers, and an open source platform called WriteFreely powering it all.

To celebrate, for the next two weeks ending February 16th, we're having a sale on our long-term, 5-year Pro plan, and iOS app. You can read all about it on our Write.as Deals newsletter.

In the beginning

When we launched Write.as in 2015, the internet was quite a different place. Our founder, Matt, saw some of the issues of the time, and wanted to build a product that directly addressed them, with digital privacy at the forefront.

At the time, the world was still hearing news of mass surveillance by intelligence agencies around the world, combined with what we already knew about the dominant tech business model that has since only continued to metastasize, summed up in a then-new term called “[surveillance capitalism](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstractid=2594754)_.”

On top of that, we recognized the cycle that cheap, free-flowing venture capital perpetuated, as helpful products sprouted up with all cash and no business model, only to go away once the money ran out. Over and over, people would connect and create on these new apps and platforms, only to see them close down without much notice.

We wanted to do things differently: encouraging free expression by protecting privacy, and building with an eye toward the next decade, not the next funding round.

How far we’ve come

Now 11 years later, we’ve grown to host over 600,000 users and 6.6 million posts. We’ve helped non-bloggers start blogging, and writers find new community and readers to share their work with.

We’ve released our source code, so anyone can host their own individual blog or entire writing community, where they have choice and control over their data and how the app runs. We were one of the first platforms to bring long-form writing to the modern open social web (the “fediverse” as powered by ActivityPub), and have since grown with it over the years. There are now hundreds of independent blogs and communities running on WriteFreely across the web!

In the years since launching, we’ve also inspired similar minimalist blogging platforms and anonymous publishing tools. And we’ve stuck to our original principles — that we would always remain ad- and tracking-free; that we would be funded by our customers, not venture capital; and that we would continue building the open web.

Looking ahead

So what’s next? As always, we’ll continue carefully maintaining the platform and tending to everyone publishing on Write.as. We’ll continue developing WriteFreely, so you’ll never be locked in with us, and can host your data where you please.

We’ll also continue developing new features where they make sense. Some are planned that will help more people interact with your blogs from across the open web, and we have plenty of small quality-of-life fixes we hope to get out soon.

As always, we’re honored to be the platform of choice for so many writers around the world, and to be trusted with your words. If you haven’t subscribed to our 5-year Pro plan yet, be sure to do that while our sale is going on. Otherwise, we’re proud to be a success story for building sustainable, open and long-term products for the web, and we look forward to doing it for many, many more years to come!

As always, thank you so much for writing with us.

#anniversary