Your writing app is shutting down: a survival guide

If you've just had the email — the service is closing, or the free tier is going away, or the terms changed and your projects are suddenly locked — take a breath. This is a solvable problem, and panicking into the wrong first move is the only way to make it worse. Work the list in order.

This is really happening — a current example

NovelEasy, a browser-based novel-writing service, carries a notice on its own site right now: it "is no longer being maintained and will be shut down on October 1, 2026," and tells users to download their work from the link at the top of each novel, because all content on the server will be erased. If that's the email you got, this guide is written for you, and you have until that date and not a day more.

It's worth saying plainly: NovelEasy is doing this the decent way — months of notice, a working download button. Plenty of shutdowns give less. When Editorially closed in 2014 it offered an export window; when NaNoWriMo's site went offline in 2025, a lot of writers found their data simply gone. So don't count on a grace period you haven't confirmed. Assume the wall is real and act as if it's sooner than stated.

Step 1: Export everything, today

Not "soon". Today. Before you research replacements, before you read a single "best alternatives" list, before you decide anything. The one action that can only be done while the service still breathes is pulling your files out of it. Everything else can be done next month.

• Find the export command. It's usually under a project menu, an account/settings page, or a "download my data" link. If there's a bulk "export all", use it. If export is one project at a time, keep reading — step 2 is for you.
• Export in every format offered. DOCX, RTF, Markdown, plain text, PDF, EPUB, the app's own project file — take all of them. Disk space is free; a lost draft is not. Different formats carry different things, and you won't know which one saved your outline until later.
• Save to a disk you control. Your own hard drive, an external drive, a different cloud account than the one that's closing. Not back into the dying service's own storage.
• Name the folder with today's date and the app's name — 2026-07-24 NovelEasy export — so future-you knows what it is and when it was true.

Step 2: If it exports one project at a time

Per-project export turns a ten-minute rescue into an afternoon, and that's exactly the kind of job people put off until the deadline passes. Beat it with a list.

• Write down every project the app is holding — including the abandoned ones, the false starts, the thing you wrote in 2021 and forgot. Those are the ones that vanish silently, because nobody's watching them.
• Export each, tick it off. A dull checklist is the whole trick. Do it in one sitting if you can; a half-finished export list is how projects fall through the cracks.
• Don't trust the count in your head. Open the account and look. People routinely forget a project or two, and "I'm pretty sure I got them all" is not something you can check after the servers go dark.

Step 3: Triage what you actually got

Here's the part that catches people. There are two different things inside a novel tool — the manuscript (your prose) and the planning (outline, beats, characters, timeline, which scene belongs to which thread) — and they survive export at very different rates.

The prose usually travels fine. If you exported DOCX, RTF, Markdown or plain text, open one right now in a different program — Word, a text editor, anything. If your chapters are there and readable, that half of the job is done and you can stop worrying about it.

The planning is where things quietly die. Outlines, character sheets, timelines and the structure connecting your scenes often come out as a proprietary project file only the dying app can read, or a JSON dump that's technically openable and practically useless, or they don't export at all. A year of structural thinking can evaporate while the prose survives intact. So check it specifically:

• Open every export and ask which of your work is inside it — just chapters, or the outline and notes too?
• Keep the proprietary project file even if nothing can read it today. Someone may write an importer later, and it's the densest copy of your planning you'll ever have.
• If the planning didn't come out in any usable form, move straight to the next step while the old app is still open.

Step 4: Rebuild the planning while you still can

If your outline, timeline or character web didn't export cleanly, the moment to rescue it is now, with the old app still running in another window to copy from. Once it shuts down, you're reconstructing from memory, and memory is not a backup.

• Put it somewhere plain and portable. A spreadsheet, a folder of text files, a new planning tool — anything that isn't locked to a company. One row per scene with its POV, place, time and the thread it belongs to will carry almost any outline forward.
• Screenshot the visual stuff. Boards, timelines, relationship maps — if you can't export them, capture them. An image of your plot board is a poor copy, but it's infinitely better than a blank page and a fading memory.
• Copy the small connective notes. The "remember X pays off in chapter 20" scribbles are the first things you'll lose and the hardest to reconstruct. Grab them.

Step 5: Pick a tool that can't strand you again

Once your book is safe, you can choose a home for it without a deadline over your head. Whatever you're weighing, judge it against three separate promises — most apps make only one:

1. Does it keep a real file on your own disk? A folder you can find, copy and back up — not just a cache the app manages for itself.
2. Does that file open without a sign-in? Some apps store files locally but still gate them behind an account or a current subscription, so a lapse locks you out of a file that's physically yours.
3. Can a second, unrelated program read the export? Test it before you commit: export a project, open the result in something else. If only the app itself can read its files, you've picked the same trap in a new colour.

An app that passes all three can close its doors tomorrow and it changes nothing about your access to your book — you lose future updates, not the novel. That's the whole test, and it's worth running before you move in, not after. There's a fuller version of this thinking, and why copyright ownership isn't the same as being able to produce a file, in where is your novel, actually?

The one-page checklist

Print this, or paste it into a note, and work top to bottom:

1. Export every project, in every format, today.
2. List every project first, so none get missed — including old ones.
3. Save exports to a disk the dying app doesn't control; date the folder.
4. Open the exports in a different program — confirm the prose is really there.
5. Check the planning data specifically; keep the project file even if it's unreadable.
6. Rebuild any missing outline/timeline/characters while the old app is still open.
7. Screenshot boards and timelines you can't export.
8. Only then, choose a new tool — and test its export before you trust it.

How this shapes what I'm building

My product, so weigh it accordingly. I started Plotloft partly because of exactly this problem, so it's built to fail the reader gently. Projects are ordinary files in Documents\Plotloft\projects\, one per book, and each is plain JSON you can open in Notepad and read. There's no server and no account, so there's nothing to shut down that would take your work with it — the docs page on where your novel lives lists every path. If I stopped tomorrow, your files would sit exactly where they are, openable by the installed copy and readable as text by anything else.

Two honest limits: it's a planning board rather than a drafting app, so today it exports its own .plotloft project files, not DOCX; and it's Windows-only and in pre-release. If those rule it out, run the three-promise test on whatever you're considering instead — that matters more than which app you land on.

Fair questions, straight answers