"No notice of auto-renewal, unhelpful customer service"

I was charged for the renewal of an annual subscription without being notified in advance that the renewal was pending. I contacted the company within an hour of the charge for a refund, and was point-blank refused.

This is essentially subscription-trapping, especially given they don't give fair notice of auto-renewal as stipulated by the "fair subscription terms" sheet produced by the AMC based on the Consumer Contracts Regulations.

Avoid this company; they will take your money and politely laugh in your face if you try to get it back.

"Takes care of your writing and organizational needs"

Using this webapp for about two years now after trying almost any other similar pieces of software, including writing my own purpose-built implementation.

It is opinionated in how to approach your world building but allows for a wide range of customization. The most important fact is that the base assumption is for an author having the wish to share with others.

The community is extremely helpful, and the developers proactively engage with the user base to refine the experience, resulting in almost daily updates. There is even a built-in voting system for users to propose changes.

Outside their product, the company was really helpful, taking care of me when I botched a purchase of a gift subscription by not reading everything the page said.

The only big downside of this astonishing development cycle is that documentation can be on the thin side for some features, can be lacking or severely outdated. Joining the Discord Community should be seen as a part of using the Application.

Pricing is appropriate to the number of features, with fine-grained subscription levels and prorated upgrades.

"When I got into table top RPG's"

When I got into table top RPG's, and building my own world I started off with a Word document. I then transitioned into using Cherrytree, and even tried Onenote, Mediawiki and other systems.

However: World Anvil has blown all of them out of the water for building a homebrew world, where I can make sure each thread is properly tied to the next thread, where I know which building has what owner, and when I quickly add something to a location or person, I know that during our next game I can click through the world to get where we left off.

Session notes are just like that too. I still use notepad during games to make quick notes, but a simple copy into WA will immediate store it. Using a few @'s to add links to articles, and I immediately have everything at the touch of a finger. It's made keeping track of things that have happened so much easier, and using the same mention system I can easily add new articles based on my notes.

The last thing where it's really helped me step up my game, is the link with maps and articles. Not having to manually add literal names to a map after the fact, but instead having an icon based system where I can draw out a map and then later on when my party has decided they want to venture one way or another, I can add a marker to show where that village is. Or when they have uncovered a secret lair in the middle of nowhere, no need to update the whole map. Just add a new marker, add a link to an article description of it and onwards we go.

I can 100% recommend it.

Does it have its flaws? Sure! Every system does. However unlike massively overcommercialised nonsensical systems, I feel heard and understood by people that share my passion for RPG's, for building proper well thought out stories, and other likeminded people. The community is honestly a blessing and I can say with absolute certainty that I am happy with it.

"Careful..."

The first red flag is how you can start a subscription without any sort of "Are you sure?" popup.

The real issue, however, is that when you cancel your subscription, they won't actually cancel it, I just got charged for a second year when I cancelled my subscription last year, I know I did because when I go to my payment page, it says I've unsubscribed - on both payments.

I looked up if anyone else has been having this issue, and apparently yes, they do, what's even worse is that WorldAnvil will ask you to supply them with a copy of an e-mail they claim they've sent you with the cancellation of your subscription, which, spoiler alert, they never did.

These guys will make it extremely easy to accidentally start a subscription by a misclick, and refuse to not only refund you, but also continue to charge you for future subscriptions, which you've already cancelled.

Edit: They did end up sending me an e-mail agreeing to reimburse my payment.

"Nice!"

I’ve used WA since February 2018 for my hobby (worldbuilding and writing). It has changed a lot over the years since it’s still in beta and it’s something that happens when the developer listens to their community.

I’ve been a paying customer since around March 2018 and during that time it has changed payment platform once. From patreon to fastspring. I have to say that I preferred patreon since it was more transparent but I suppose that fastspring is more professional. I have a custom fee since I am also paying for my sibling’s subscription. It’s been working fine. :)

The site has a steep learning curve for some users but I’ve always found it intuitive. I enjoy how the templates are split up and I’m looking forward to the new timeline feature.

There’s several ways to use customer service. Back in the day I just chatted with the developer on the site. Now when the site has boomed and the developer is super busy it is easiest to get help on the discord from other community members (like me! :D ) or when it comes to payment issues it is easiest to mail them and ask their PA.

"Charging $110 yearly even after previous cancellation, refusing to reimburse charges"

Today I woke up to a $110 USD charge for a full year's subscription to World Anvil. I had previously subscribed a year ago, and while the service itself was great, I was shocked when I was hit with the charge, as I had previously cancelled my subscription with the company on the same day I did my one-year subscription. I always do this as a best practice with all services specifically to avoid situations like this, and have not had an issue with any other service I used along side it (D&D Beyond, Roll20, etc).


I hadn't used the service in several months so I immediately contacted World Anvil and told them about the issue. I didn't think this would be a large deal as I had already cancelled previously and contacted them within an hour or two of the charge. I was told that unless I can produce an email they had allegedly previously sent to me showing that I had cancelled the services a year ago, they would not reimburse the charge, even though their website clearly shows my account in the cancelled status.

I checked my emails and did not have a cancellation email from them from a year ago. Apparently the email is the only thing they will accept, regardless of account status.

Because I brought up this issue with them, as punishment in retaliation they have now disabled my subscription and are telling me to delete my account, but they are not reimbursing the money they charged today. I've lost access to all of the content I had previously created as well with my group. I've now paid $110 USD for service I cannot even use for the year I just "paid" for, lost hundreds of hours of content created, and World Anvil still holds my payment information (they allegedly cannot delete my card info), and for all I know will do the same thing to me again a year from now.

I brought up that they do not provide any warning about the significant charges and had I gotten a warning about the upcoming charge this would (or should) not have been a problem as I could have contacted them earlier about the error in their system. Their response was "we don't have to provide a warning as we're in the EU and so we don't". This is convenient for them, since they can now say that they've "not gotten written notification" about a cancellation and will charge users anyways, without recourse.


This is apparently a fairly common issue with the company. You can check their responses to similar issues on their Reddit account, where they openly admit to deleting user's accounts that have run into this issue. Had I known about it ahead of time I would have only subscribed on a month-to-month basis to begin with (or not subscribed at all).