Pros and Cons of Ellipsus Software for Writers
a guest post by Kaiden Alderling
Ellipsus is a freemium writing and collaboration tool for writers, offering both free and paid versions. As a browser-based text editor, it has a distinct focus on anti-AI offerings and web-based publishing and collaboration. Users can use themes to change the colours and fonts displayed by the interface, and can easily export or copy text in multiple formats for online publishing. Fan writers will find the AO3 export tool especially useful. However, limitations to collaboration and tools for organising longer works make it a tough sell for power users. A lack of automated backups, reported server connection and sync issues, and unclear terms for allowed/prohibited content make for a murky user experience.
As a writer and poet, I think that the most important part of writing is the actual writing. Any platform that works for you? That’s the right one, and my first and foremost advice is to always back up your work, no matter what software you use.
For writers looking at trying out something new, I’ve taken a look at what’s going on with Ellipsus.
One of the web app’s biggest selling points? It’s easy to get started with and use for basic writing, and it’s dead simple to switch between devices with.
The company’s anti-AI ethos is attractive to authors concerned about scraping of private and publicly exposed documents for large language model (LLM) training.
Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Ellipsus GmbH is a European company with European users, and has laid out its privacy policy to showcase its compliance with European GDPR and German data protection law, including an explicit promise to “never use your writing to train AI models.” Its hosting with Amazon Web Services is also provided through EU regions (see “Service providers we work with“).
According to the terms of service, a user’s “content” within the service refers not only to the user’s files, documents, and drafts, but also to comments and chat messages. Users explicitly own that content. Ellipsus explicitly promises not to use any of it for “training or developing machine learning or AI models of any kind” and this is echoed in the privacy policy.
“Snippets” sharing tool is a hit with writers who like to share quotes from their manuscripts and works-in-progress with an external audience, showcasing customisable, social-media-friendly designs (with additional customisation in the Plus version).
Theme customisation: users enjoy a similar level of customisation with the interface, mostly involving adjustments to to colours and fonts. Dark and light themes—among others—are available in the free version, and custom themes are available in the Plus plan.
Convenient export functionality allows users to download any individual document as a PDF, DocX, or Markdown file; or to copy it as HTML, Markdown, or Rich Text. Fan writers may appreciate the export functionality that allows linking an account directly to Archive of Our Own.
Browser-based text editor offers ease in switching between devices, making it a popular alternative to writing in Google Docs (also: unlike in Ellipsus, GDocs’s scroll bar makes me lose my place every time my thumb brushes the side of the screen). As a writing app, Ellipsus boasts a low barrier-to-entry compared to more privacy-focused tools that focus on encryption. Personally, I also enjoy writing with Markdown shortcuts enabled in Ellipsus, which allow for quick formatting when typing on mobile.
“Writing Insights” (Plus plan) tool uses “simple, programmed algorithms that run locally on your device”—the ability to highlight frequently used words and passive voice can be a useful tool while editing. These simple metrics are similar to word count or the “find and replace” tool in complexity; there’s zero indication that they use any sort of “AI” or LLM-based processing, and Ellipsus confirms that the feature does not use AI.
Queer-founded, with support from Gaingels Syndicate, a US-based venture capital firm that aims to support LGBTQ-friendly tech investment, as well as diversity and inclusion in hiring.
Introduction of a paid plan (“Ellipsus Plus“) indicates the potential for a sustainable business plan, and the “yours to keep” model provides a lifetime licence after 24 months of payments (currently $6 USD per month, with a final price of $144 USD). No credit card is required for the free 7-day trial.
note: numbers in parenthesis are footnotes; see the end of the post for the notes!
No desktop version or offline version. Currently, the only way to access Ellipsus is through a browser on your computer or mobile device.
Lack of automated backups—or any simple way to regularly export all of the files in a user’s account—makes Ellipsus concerning as a primary place to write and store documents. With any platform, loss of data is always a possibility: always back up your work! (1)
Editing: A lack of track changes functionality (also known as selective merging, suggestions, or inline track changes) means that editors or beta readers need to leave comments on the work instead of being able to provide individual suggestions at a granular level. I also find it clunky to manage editing in the platform; writers need to create a separate “draft” to allow comments. Drafts can be merged, but doing so isn’t as intuitive or specific as track changes.
Writing: This becomes especially confusing when drafts are also used as a workaround for a lack of chapter/tab functionality, and a common criticism online is that the platform lags on documents with longer word counts. There is no support for tables, and nested lists often break upon import/export, even in Markdown. (2)
Collaboration: Commenters need their own Ellipsus accounts, so depending on how common Ellipsus already is in your own writing circles, it might not be the easiest platform to onboard beta readers to.
Version history: only 30 days are included with the free plan.
No encryption for documents, which might otherwise alleviate concerns about allowed content.
Security concerns: no multi-factor authentication is currently available for logging in, despite Ellipsus now accepting payments. (3)
Bug reports online include issues with syncing and loss of work (always click the sync button to ensure your work syncs), server connection issues, random movement through the document, keys sticking, and unexpected formatting changes to paragraph spacing and fonts. A ticketing system is available, but the best way to reach support is through the Discord server, which is very unfortunately very common with modern apps.
Unclear terms for allowed content: as a young platform, Ellipsus is largely untested when it comes to policing of user content within the platform. The terms of service assure that content written “privately within Ellipsus” isn’t policed, but some content is against the rules, namely plagiarism and planning/committing crimes (4), and that prohibited content is subject to reporting from readers who receive access to the document, as well as legal requests (keeping in mind Ellipsus’s European jurisdiction). Ellipsus also recognises the community’s concerns that the payment processor Stripe might “pressure” Ellipsus over “adult or NSFW content” and has responded that in the case of a “serious conflict with our values, user privacy, or the kinds of (lawful) writing our users create, we would evaluate alternatives. If necessary, we would migrate payment providers.” (5)(6) Please remember that I am not a lawyer, and that this summary is not legal advice.
Abrupt changes are always possible with any SaaS (software as a service), especially to the free version. Growth of the platform is imperative for a company with Ellipsus’s funding structure, based on both its venture capital backing (7) and its lifetime licence structure. It will require additional users to continue bringing in cash flow, and as with any company, it could shift focus from its current niche of fan writers and toward a larger potential userbase.
The opt-in tool Emboss, available as part of the Plus plan, appears to have been planned by the company from early on (8). The purpose of this tool is to provide evidence of human authorship by combining a number of metrics with the ability to provide a public link to past versions of the document (“selected version history snapshots“). While the tool doesn’t provide any kind of score or assessment as to whether the document was or was not human authored, I personally don’t think it was well-executed, and I was concerned when Ellipsus seemed to be suggesting that sharing Emboss links might provide a writer with a public shield against accusations of AI use. While this tool might be able to provide evidence of the evolution of a work to an editor or publisher through version history, it doesn’t seem to provide any more value than other tools with version control. (9)
The “Right to portability” section under the privacy policy specifies that users can request a “machine-readable export” which includes your writing.
One of the co-founders addressed the lack of some of these features in a reply to a document posted by both co-founders in June 2026.
The company updated the privacy policy by June 10, 2026 to indicate that full credit card numbers were not being stored by Ellipsus, but were handled by the payment processor. The co-founder responded to a user question on June 13, 2026 saying that multi-factor authentication/two-factor authentication would move to a planned feature, and this has been added as a “big priority” to the June 2026 document (item 35).
Item 28 in the June 2026 document elaborates that “NSFW content is not illegal” and “is permitted in Ellipsus” while users should look to the terms of service “and refer to your local laws for clarification.” The terms prohibit “Us[ing] our services to do anything illegal: Write about fictional or historical crime as much as you want—please don’t use our services to plan or commit any IRL illegal activity.” In the June 2026 document, illegal content is defined as subject to the user’s local law; Ellipsus claims that they “do not actively look at or police your documents” but elaborates that users sharing their documents do so at their own risk. “We don’t actively police public work, unless it’s reported to us/we receive a valid legal or DMCA request. (If so, we will handle that according to our policies and legal obligations).”
Item 26 in the June 2026 document.
Users are also concerned because of the reality that classification systems often include all queer content within the label “adult” and that “Several regions make it illegal to discuss, promote, or teach LGBTQ+ topics.”
Including Better Angle, Circle & Co Ventures, Common Magic, SpeedInvest, and Gaingels.
An argument for the Emboss human attribution tool is laid out in some early blog posts: The Watchmakers (2023) and The Distributors.
As with the writing metrics, there is no reason to think that the metrics provided through Emboss use any sort of “AI” or LLM-based processing, and Ellipsus confirms that “No AI is used in the compiling of these metrics.”
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