Introducing: Ellipsus Plus

Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023!

Back then, we began building Ellipsus with a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.

Generative AI has moved quickly into creative tools, writing platforms, publishing spaces—and seemingly every other corner of the internet—without consent, transparency, or respect for the writers whose work trained these systems in the first place. The need for independent human-first alternatives has never felt more urgent.

We see this reflected everyday in our growing community—Ellipsus is now home to nearly 600,000 writers (and counting!), hosting over 5 million documents. Writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.

We're so honoured that people are choosing Ellipsus to be their writing home. We're a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day.

And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.

Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus. It helps fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.

That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including some major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).

Plus exists so we can keep building the tool you love.

https://youtu.be/XWlieX-amIw

Before deciding what Plus should be, we asked you—our 28k+ strong Discord community—what you wanted to see in a paid plan, and what sort of pricing felt fair to you.

More than 3,000 users responded to our survey on Ellipsus Plus. In that survey, we asked users what amount felt feasible and fair, and set our pricing to match accordingly. More than 70% of respondents said they liked or loved the idea of a subscribe-to-own model: a way to keep Ellipsus funded long-term, while breaking up the cost of the license in a way that works for our community.

Subscribe-to-own

We all have subscription fatigue. With the subscribe-to-own model, you can buy Plus outright with a one-time purchase, or join the annual or monthly payment plans. Your payments count toward ownership of your Ellipsus Plus license.

We think ownership of creative tools is non-negotiable. Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan.

With any plan, you can start using all Plus features immediately; and once it’s paid in full, you own Ellipsus Plus forever. No endless subscriptions.

And when we asked what Plus features people wanted to see, the top requests included supporting Ellipsus and helping keep it sustainable—hell yeah!—AI-safety features, custom themes, and writing insights.

So… that’s what we built!

Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool!

We really hope you enjoy them.

Custom themes

You know we love a good theme. We also know every story has a whole personality and mood of its own—smutty vampiric melodrama, candlelit yearning, an academic thesis on why the villain had a point, or this GIF understands my protagonist better than I do.

With custom themes, you can design your writing space using any colors, gradients, images, and GIFs. Chill, romantic, moody, gothic, sparkly, Myspace-ified, meme’d, or an homage to that particular character (you know the one) who won’t leave you alone? Make as many as you want. The choices are (for all practical and mildly dangerous purposes) infinite.

You can also attach custom themes to Reader links when you share your work with others, use them as backdrops for your shareable Snippets, and easily export and import themes to share with friends and your community.

We can’t freaking wait to see what you come up with.

Emboss

Emboss is our proof-of-work layer for human writing.

Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, ignite witch hunts, and occasionally appear to believe a particular punctuation is probable cause (Em Dash Defense Squad chiming in), Emboss is AI-free, and comes from real writing-process data from inside Ellipsus: time spent writing, sessions, edits, thinking pauses, revisions, and other selected metrics you choose to share—your Writing Journey.

Emboss lets you show the human labor behind your work through an authorship badge and metrics card attached to a document, draft, or Reader link. Your Emboss data is private by default, and only visible if you choose to share it.

You can also opt to share selected snapshots of your version history on Reader links to show how the work came together.

And this is all without data scraping or AI algorithms purporting to know whether you “sound human” enough. Instead, Emboss shows the record of the labor, care, and love that went into your work.

(AKA… the human stuff.)

Writing insights

Writing insights gives you a clearer view of your own prose. You can spot patterns across nine metrics, including vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, paragraph density, sentence openers, passive voice, adverbs, word frequency, and repeated echoes.

These insights are created from simple pattern-counting inputs that run locally on your device. That means (say it with us!) no AI is used, and your text never leaves the editor.

It’s a great way to understand the texture and flow (and let’s be honest… the wonky bits) of your own writing: what makes your words yours, so you can keep writing, and keep improving.

Customizable Snippets

Our expanded Snippets feature lets you turn your favorite lines into shareable images, now customizable to make those words pop. You can match a Snippet to your custom theme, upload an image or GIF, use any Ellipsus font, any color choice, and add byline credits for authors or characters. Then send your words out into the world looking their best.

... And this isn't all of Ellipsus Plus. There will be more features added as we build, alongside improvements to the free plan—soon.

Ellipsus Plus is here to help us build sustainably: for writers on the free plan, for Plus writers, and for the long-term future of Ellipsus and independent creative tools.

We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! There’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better.

Thank you for your support; now please, go forth and explore! You can start your 7 day free trial any time.

Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there!

Happy writing,

- The Ellipsus Team

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.