Stay Away From Livingston Research

I've been working for LR since December 2016. My experience was mostly positive till July 2017. Right now, I've got to admit that the company is going to hell. I guess freelancers need to know the truth about this pathetic essay mill.

Don't let the operators, graders and the management fool you with their cloyingly polite, sweet language: you, as a Writer, are not worth anything to them. Let me explain why.

The company is currently expanding their "full-time writers" department, so freelancers are now receiving only a tiny fraction of available orders. Compare: right now, there are 11 orders in my feed. Exactly a year ago - that is, December 2016 - there were no less than 100, sometimes 150 orders. In short, full-timers scrape off the cream, you as a freelancer are left with the dregs.

The company has upped the minimum price for their clients. At the same time, they have dropped the minimum price for the writers. A couple of months ago, the minimum writer's rate was $4.5/page, now it is $3. Go figure.

Orders - Like I said, good orders are picked by fulltimers. What reaches you is abstruse, incomprehensible orders with longitudinal descriptions that nobody wants to work on.

The new Writer's interface is slow and buggy. You can't just skim through the orders list: you have to open each and every one, and when you close the order, the interface freezes up and throws you at the top of the list. It happens all the time and they can't do anything about that.

They say that the average wage is $800. This is, in all honesty, a lie. With the current workload and the grading policy, you would be lucky to earn $200.

Graders - the most disgusting type of people I've been unlucky to meet. These are mostly illiterate, uppity individuals who've never read anything longer than the grading rubric. They are supposed to proofread your papers, but at times, all they do is they add mistakes of their own. They worship the grading rubric as the Holy Bible and never use their own judgment.

Fines - It seems like they take some kind of sadistic pleasure in handing out fines, often for ridiculous reasons. You need to understand that the company will lick the Client's ass no matter what, even at your own expense. The client may place an order that you will accept and write. Then the Client changes his mind and asks you to rewrite the whole paper. The company suspends the order and tells you to "revise" it - for free, of course. If you refuse, they fine you 100% of the order price. They've recently fined me 100% because I literally refused to write another page for free. This sort of abuse is so rife that Writers are starting to take it for granted.

Operators - These guys are mostly polite and harmless, but very slow. Back in December 2016, they normally responded within 2-5 minutes. Now it takes at least 30 minutes, sometimes hours.

As of yet, I wouldn't recommend Livingston to anyone. You will not earn anything here but you will definitely waste your time and lose all hope in freelance occupation.

Livingston Research doesn't sound like they are trying to pull off a scam on the writers that is any different from every other fly by night / scamming website out there. While I condole with that is going with you at the company, I am more interested to learn about what you have done to protect yourself from this abuse. Since you are not recommending that writers work for this company at this point, does that mean you have quit being a freelance writer for the company? Or are you still weighing your options? Personally, if I cannot clear at least $500 a month with the company, I would leave them in a heartbeat. I hope that you are not planning to allow them to continue to abuse you just because you feel that you do not have any options at this point. I was once in that situation and that is what kept me in the game, being abused at every turn by a particular company for 7 years. Do yourself a favor, weighing your options won't get you anywhere. Leave and strike out on your own. This forum can help you do that, just as it has helped others here. While I no longer write academic papers for a living, I found a family here where I manage to help others simply by speaking my mind and by giving advice to those in need. I hope my comments can help you as well.

Smiley73, I am working full-time as a journalist so LR is not my sole source of income. I've not terminated cooperation with LR yet, though. The moment I come across another freelance writing option, I will bide LR farewell. As to protection: the only way to protect yourself from abuse is to stop writing for the abuser, I guess, which I've been doing recently.

Could you explain how they define "full-time writers"? Do they go to work to their physical office?

@Major - exactly. they go the office and write essays like a regular job

Greedy bast***s.. That order I was talking about - it cost around 10 bucks. I completed and uploaded it, but then they ordered me to write another page - for free. Obviously, I refused to do that. So they levied a 100% fine. An hour later I was browsing the orders feed and I saw the same order priced $2. My order, that I had proofread and everything.

The $3.5-$10 rate per page - it suggests their customers are all ESL students (possibly from countries like China or India)? Because a native English speaker educated and living in a Western country is not going to work for $4 per page.

I often wonder what customers end up getting in situations like this Assuming your writing was perfect and they reassigned it simply because they hated the idea of you refusing to work for free, doesn't that mean a customer is likely to get a lower quality paper simply because of the companies pride?

The customers are ESLs studying in English-speaking countries as well as native speakers. This particular client was a Chinese national studying in the States. Their Writers, though, are mostly ESLs, including myself.

@RandomRandom
for 2 bucks, what kind of an essay can they possibly get? mediocre, shoddy, full of glaring mistakes.

It is hard to determine the quality of the writing considering the prices that were charged of the clients. The lower the price charged, the lower the quality of work. Remember, quality comes at a cost. Therefore, if you are paying between $10-$20 per page for the paper, you can bet that you are not getting a professional ENL writer on the other end. These students pay for the low quality papers because the final product is aligned with their own English abilities. That is not to say that the writer is going to turn in mediocre work. The work submitted will actually be commensurate to the pay received. However, even an ESL writer has his limits and asking him to work on an extra page for free is nothing more than the company scamming him from receiving extra pay. You can bet that the client was charged extra for that page. They just did not inform the writer about it.

Normally, when an order like that hits the system again, the tendency of the new writer will be write a totally new essay rather than having to edit and revise the existing one. It is always easier to start from scratch in these instances. The writer does not have any idea what the previous pay was and it is probably difficult for him to grab orders from the server anyway so he won't care it is priced at $2 per page. What matters to him is that he got something to work on and be paid for.

Hi! I'm new to this forum and I happened to stumble across your review of Livingston Research. I'm currently a freelance writer on the platform and I'd like to know if you're still working for LR.

Unless you'd like to get sued, I highly suggest that you retract that statement. Several legitimate, American companies charge less than $20 per page.

@writers2beware Did you eventually sue @Smiley73? When you make a threat like that, I expect to read a follow up that says you actually threw the legal books at the offender. After all, the retraction you demanded was never delivered. It seems your threat of a lawsuit was ignored. So you got egg on your face instead?

If you were not libeled, why did you react so violently? No specific names or profiles were mentioned in that post. LR did not even react and their company was the one directly discussed by the poster. So, what gives? Why did you fail to follow through? Was there an out of court settlement for something the poster never did ? Or did you get sued instead?

I do not understand where all of the hostility towards this poster comes from. He seems to only want to help but specific people here seem to just want to bully the user. I also do not understand why the people behind this forum allow bullying to exist here. It isn't just @Smiley73 that gets bullied regularly here. What pleasure do you get out of it? How do you expect your actions, such as bullying to actually help your business? Sometimes the actions of the senior members at this forum just don't make any sense.

Livingston Research claims to have an open writer hiring policy these days but their requirements are not easily achievable for both the ENL and ESL writers. So I think they are playing a game here. Last I heard, they do not have any more human writers onboard and have been relying on AI writing, without openly admitting it because their clients still expect humans on the other end. If this is true then they are fooling only themselves. They will lose their remaining clients once the clients figure out that the cost being charged is for brainless writing instead of human logic.

There's no such thing as a defamation suit for saying something broad, like "any company that charges less than $20/pg is a scam" because you can't "defame" an entire class of people or companies. You can't get sued by any good NES writer in NYC for saying "every academic writer in NYC is really just a terrible ESL writer," either. To be defamed, you'd need to be sufficiently identifiable as the specific entity being referenced. The only exception would be where there are so few of them that "all" could reasonably be said to be a reference to you, such as "every single lawyer in this town is a thieving crook who robs his clients" in a town with only two lawyers.

according to Brian Krebs, Livingston Research is tied to a Putin goon Vadim Lobov. another reason to stay away krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/drones-to-diplomas-how-russias-largest-private-university-is-linked-to-a-25m-essay-mill/