ShorthandA plan for every team

How do I get started?

Starting is easy! Sign up for free right now, and create as many stories as you like. Publish three stories for free on Prime before upgrading to a paid Prime plan, or contact us to discuss a trial of Pro or Premium.

How do I publish stories?

That’s up to you.

You can:

• host stories on your own servers and domain (e.g., yourbrand.com) using our premium publishing options,
or
• take advantage of simple 1-click publishing with Shorthand hosting and a custom subdomain (e.g., customdomain.yourbrand.com) or a shorthandstories.com subdomain (e.g., yourbrand.shorthandstories.com).

If you choose Shorthand hosting, we can advise on the best way to integrate content into your existing website or top-level domain for optimal traffic and SEO. For example, on Pro and Premium plans, use our embed code to load a story into any existing web page by pasting a short code snippet.

Our premium publishing options include S3 and API downloads. S3 publishing enables you to publish to your own AWS S3 bucket with a single click. With the API option, you can fully automate a custom story publishing workflow — integrating Shorthand with your existing CMS.

Additionally, some plans include zip file exports that bundle the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and media assets. Zip exports are intended for backup purposes. However, they may be used as an alternative to our supported publishing methods above, but our ability to support zip files as a publishing method may be limited due to the vast range of hosting solutions in existence.

Our expert sales and onboarding team are happy to guide you through the best publishing option and plan to suit your unique business needs. You can also learn more about publishing options on our support site.

What is a publishing destination?

A publishing destination is the place where your Shorthand stories are published. To set up a publishing destination you need to choose a publishing method (e.g., Shorthand hosting, Wordpress plugin, S3, or one of our other publishing integrations), and the base URL for your stories (e.g., yourbrand.com/stories or stories.yourbrand.com).

One publishing destination is included in the price of every plan. Additional publishing destinations incur an extra fee which varies according to your plan.

What support do you provide?

Our customer support is part of the Shorthand magic. Really. Here's what one customer recently told us:

“Please know that you have had a very large and positive influence on my life and how the next few weeks will proceed work-wise.”

That's the kind of impact our support and success team delivers every single day.

Shorthand is beautifully simple to use, but we're here when you need us! You can contact us via email or the in-app Help Center.

We have extensive support documentation and training videos in our knowledge base. You may also like to become part of our Shorthand community for all things Shorthand and visual storytelling.

Customers also benefit from our story review service, where we provide feedback on your stories if you'd like us to. See the plans for details.

Basically, we've got you covered!

Can I commit on a month-by-month basis?

Only Prime plans can be purchased on a month-by-month basis. Published stories will remain live while a paid subscription is active.

Pro and Premium plans are sold on an annual contract basis with the option to pay monthly or yearly. We offer a discounted rate for yearly payments.

If you're looking for a risk-free way to get started with Pro or Premium features, we recommend a managed trial: try our fully-featured professional plans on a limited-time basis before making a financial commitment. Request a managed trial.

What are your payment terms?

We keep our billing simple so we can focus on delivering an exceptional storytelling platform.

For monthly billed customers we accept credit cards only.

For annually billed customers we accept credit cards and bank transfers (ACH credit for US customers).

We are unable to accept cheques/checks.

Our payment terms are strictly Net-0 day (i.e., due upon receipt), excepting Premium customers on tailored agreements.

What happens when I cancel my subscription?

That depends on the terms of your subscription and how you've hosted your Shorthand content.

If you're on a Pro or Premium plan, you'll need to ensure that you've published and/or exported all of your content — then simply reach out to us to let us know that you don't wish to renew your subscription at the end of your contract term. If you have content hosted on Shorthand servers — as is typically the case when using the embed publishing method — we can advise on porting the content to alternate hosting arrangements.

If you're on a paid Prime plan, you can downgrade to the free version of the plan at the end of your billing cycle. The free Prime plan entitles you to three free published stories on Shorthand hosting. If you've published more than three stories when your paid subscription ends, our team will work with you to identify your preferred three stories. The remaining published stories will be moved back to an unpublished state, so that you can continue to access them in your workspace, and later re-publish them upon reactivation of a paid subscription. At any time, you can also change your mind about the selection of the three published stories: unpublishing a story will return the publishing entitlement and allow you to redeploy it to an alternate story.

How are Prime plan page views tracked and billed?

Page views are tracked using built-in Shorthand Analytics. Each time a published story is retrieved by a visitor, a page view is logged. You can track how many views your stories have had via the view count on the story dashboard, or by opening the more detailed analytics panel from the story card (more information here).

The price of the paid Prime plan includes a yearly quota of 50,000 views of published stories. If you exceed this amount, we will reach out to you about the additional charges. Surplus page views are billed in blocks of 10,000 views; however, if you significantly exceed the included quota, you may be billed for several blocks at once.

We host your Shorthand content using Amazon Web Services (AWS). At times — particularly when your stories are viewed by large audiences and are media-heavy — the AWS costs incurred by us exceed the price of the Prime plan. This is why we cap the included page views for this entry-level plan.

If you have large audiences for your content or require predictable billing, we recommend our Pro and Premium plans, as they include unlimited page views.