Writing9 sells online IELTS essay checking and evaluation to students preparing for the IELTS exam, especially its writing section, and its founder reported around $12K a month in revenue as of 2025-02.
What it sells and how it charges
Writing9 operates as a subscription service. Students submit an IELTS essay and receive a report covering mistakes, weak areas and ways to improve. The official site says an essay can be checked in a couple of minutes.
As checked on 2026-10-01, the official website lists these plans:
- Weekly: $7.99/week
- Monthly: $14.99/month
- Yearly: $29.99/year, marked as 20% off from $37.49
How it started
In a Starter Story founder interview dated 2025-02-16, Serhii said he built Writing9 after failing to obtain the required IELTS writing score several times and not receiving clear feedback. While living in Thailand, he coded the first version himself in about a month using React and Node.js.
Three days after sharing the website in a chat, Serhii says, the first person bought a yearly subscription. He also says that customer was still subscribed years later.
Serhii attributes a later sales change to pricing. He says replacing a cheap yearly plan with a trial by a $10/month plan without a trial made sales take off and turned Writing9 into a profitable business. The $10/month offer is an historical price, not the monthly price listed on the official site on 2026-10-01.
He attributes business growth entirely to SEO, using pages built around real IELTS writing questions as long-tail keywords. He separately reports that word of mouth spread among students.
The numbers
The revenue figure is founder-reported and historical. The Starter Story founder interview dated 2025-02-16 states that Writing9 brought in around $12K a month; the amount is dated 2025-02 and is not a claim about current income.
In the same interview, Serhii says the site reached around 2 million users per month at its peak. That is a peak user figure, not a current or paying-customer count.
Writing9’s one-person classification comes from Serhii’s explicit statement that he is a solo founder from Ukraine and built Writing9. No start cost is stated.
What stands out
- The product has a narrow, concrete scope: essay submission followed by feedback on mistakes, weak areas and improvement.
- The first sale followed a website share in a chat, while the founder attributes overall growth to SEO and also reports word-of-mouth spread among students.
- The official-site listing on 2026-10-01 covers weekly, monthly and yearly plans, while the $10/month no-trial offer belongs to the earlier pricing account in the founder interview dated 2025-02-16.
Sources
Income figures are what the founder reported, or what a payment platform verified, on the date shown. They are not current income and not a prediction of what you will earn. Method & sources · Disclosure