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, or contact us to discuss a paid plan.

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., stories.yourbrand.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, 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, and so on), and the base URL for your stories (e.g., yourbrand.com/features 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 by email, and if you have our Premium support option, by phone.

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!

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. We cannot enable (or re-enable) publishing functionality until payment is received.

What happens if I don't want to use Shorthand any more?

Simply ensure you've published and/or exported all your stories, then reach out to us to advise that you don't wish to renew your subscription.