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CustomWriting rating varies substantially across independent review platforms. CustomWriting is rated 5.0/5 on Sitejabber based on 8 reviews and 3.3/5 on Trustpilot based on 12 reviews. This means that most Trustpilot customers are not very satisfied with the purchase overall. Overall, the number of reviews doesn’t quite match the platform’s stated 16 years on the market.

Customers who are dissatisfied with CustomWriting's services most often mention the low quality of the work performed and the lack of refunds after refusing the work. Custom Writing ranks 46th among academic writing sites.

CustomWriting is an academic writing help platform that connects you with 750+ (or is it 200? – more on that below) writers across multiple disciplines. The platform offers only writing and editing services, no proofreading or problem-solving. You can also take advantage of its free AI writer. As for the paper types supported, you can get help from professional writers with an essay, research paper, assignment, dissertation, and more.

CustomWriting is a company registered in Estonia, and it gladly publishes its legal address and even the registration number. This data is always present in the footer and is also published on the About Us page:

Although the transparency about its legal status is a plus, this is where transparency ends. You’re left completely in the dark about the service’s pricing, for example, up until you get to the pre-checkout page. So, if you’re looking for a platform that communicates clearly how much you’ll have to pay and who your helper is, CustomWriting isn’t one to deliver this kind of transparency.

We spent a great deal of time looking for a breakdown of prices on the CustomWriting website, but we couldn’t unearth even the starting rates anywhere. This was the first red flag for us.

Still, we proceeded with placing an order for a five-page sociology essay on social stratification. We selected a 14-day deadline and chose the APA 7th formatting style and five sources. The essay cost us $66.25, which is relatively affordable – yet can still be too expensive for some customers.

Overall, we were frustrated with some of the paid services; we find it unfair to have customers pay for choosing their expert or VIP support. Customer support was sluggish at best, and it was unclear who CustomWriting’s writers even were. Finally, paper quality didn’t quite justify the price tag.

To answer this question, we had to assess the quality of our essay. And, well… We wouldn’t say it was worth the money, to put it bluntly – a sentiment shared by some reviewers online:

While the text itself was mostly correct in terms of grammar, word choice, and punctuation (there were a couple of typos, though), the content was too shallow for a college-level essay. The writer barely scraped the top of the barrel, never mind its bottom. The essay’s structure mostly mirrored the Wikipedia page on social stratification, but the content was shallower than that. The sources were also evidently taken from there, too.

The formatting was mostly fine, although the page margins and line spacing were not selected correctly. At least the list of references and citations were formatted according to the APA 7th guidelines. Plus, the number of sources met our initial requirements.

If you need to reach out to a CustomWriting rep, you have multiple options. The platform can be reached via a U.S. phone number, dedicated email address, or live chat. However, CustomWriting doesn’t specify whether the phone support is available around the clock. (It would be weird if that were the case, though, since it’s quite expensive to keep phone support running 24/7.)

We decided to test CustomWriting’s live chat support since it’s usually the fastest way to get an answer to your question. We sent a question regarding the extra fee for chatting with a writer before selection. The answer, while friendly and courteous, felt a bit impersonal. It wasn’t as straightforward as we would expect it to be.

That said, at the very least, we got a response almost immediately (within 60 seconds), which is a plus. But then again, the quality of the response left much to be desired. We could sort of infer the answer from the actual messages, which is not a sign of good customer support.

The first thing we noticed about CustomWriting it’s that it doesn’t give a consistent number of writers available on the platform. The About Us page states there are 200 CustomWriting writing professionals in one paragraph and 759 experts just below it:

In the order form, the platform reiterates that it connects you with 200 writers:

If you want to choose your helper yourself, prepare to pay an extra $9.99. This fee allows you to chat with available writers and select one on your own. If you don’t wish to pay this fee, a writer will be automatically assigned to your order.

We also couldn’t find a page with writer profiles anywhere on the website. All we got was the promise of “qualified experts” working on our order and that a “suitable writer” would be assigned to it. So, it remains a mystery who CustomWriting’s writers are.

The platform doesn’t offer a calculator or a pricing table anywhere on the website. It doesn’t even state the starting rates on dedicated pages for assignments, research papers, or dissertation help.

However, the service readily promotes all the free services you get with CustomWritings. Seeing free customer service on the list is somewhat bizarre, though:

When we started filling out the form, we quickly saw that the “advanced expert” was not, in fact, a free option. If you want to choose a “Platinum” writer (a writer who’s rated in the top 20 experts in your subject), prepare to pay 20% more. A “Gold” writer will inflate the order total by an extra 10%.

While this fee is somewhat widespread among academic help platforms, this is the first time we've encountered a paid option to chat with writers before choosing one. It costs $9.99!

Once we got to the pre-checkout page, we also saw several other extra-paid services. If you want a one-page abstract, VIP support, a clear outline, or an early draft, prepare to pay additional fees:

On this page, we also finally saw the per-page rate for our sociology essay: $13.25/page.

All in all, CustomWriting offers a standard revision policy. You can ask for revisions within 14 or 30 days, depending on your paper’s length. The Terms and Conditions also clearly state that revisions require at least 24 hours, though, which can be too long for you if your order was urgent in the first place.

As our essay had several typos and formatting mistakes, we requested revisions from our CustomWriting account. While the writer introduced them without any extra charge, it took almost two days to make several minor changes to the paper! If our essay had indeed been urgent, the two-day delay would’ve frustrated us even more.

Keep in mind that while revisions can be free within the specified timeframe (14/30 days), CustomWriting reserves the right to charge you for them if you send extra guidelines or sources. So, in reality, free revisions only apply to fixing mistakes and similar requests. If you want your paper expanded, for example, you’re likely to be charged for the extra work.

Let’s start with the positives: we received our essay on time. That said, it required a couple of revisions. Since they take at least 24 hours, we’d advise you to take that into account when selecting your deadline at CustomWriting.

Overall, the few reviews we found online didn’t mention late delivery or missed deadlines. Although many did complain about the poor quality of the service provided, so it’s not all good.

CustomWriting allows you to select a custom deadline using a calendar, with the shortest one being three hours, as per the information on the homepage. However, once we got to the order form, we discovered that the shortest deadline available depended on the paper length. For our five-page essay, we could choose only an eight-hour turnaround.

Another red flag we saw early on was that we couldn’t request a CustomWriting plagiarism report, even for an extra fee. That’s highly irregular; all truly reliable services offer plagiarism reports, and the best ones provide them for free.

Regardless, we ran our plagiarism and AI checks on the essay we received. The originality rates amounted to 87% and 89%, which is almost acceptable. Still, these rates mean that the paper falls short of most academic writing requirements toward plagiarism. Most commonly, an essay has to be at least 90% original, with some institutions putting the threshold at 95%.

As for the AI content checks, they didn’t identify any AI-generated content in the delivered essay. So, that’s a win for CustomWriting. That said, though, the suboptimal essay quality could hardly be compensated by the fact that it contains no AI content.

When we first started researching CustomWriting, we were taken aback by a lack of reviews on independent platforms and a lack of crucial information on its website. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t manage to redeem itself during our customer journey. Customer support wasn’t 100% helpful, certain extra fees proved some claims on the website were misleading, and the paper quality was simply not worth the price tag.

*Screenshots used for review and criticism purposes fall under the 'fair use' doctrine of the United States Copyright Law.