I Paid for Caktus.ai and Regretted It Almost Immediately
Author : Trevis Jordan | Published On : 01 Apr 2026
I am not the kind of person who writes reviews. I use tools, form an opinion, and move on. But my experience with Caktus.ai was bad enough that I actually feel like I owe it to other students to say something. Because the way this platform is marketed on TikTok and in student forums, you would think it is the best thing to ever happen to academic writing. It is not. Not even close.
I am a third-year business student. I have used a handful of AI writing tools over the past two years. Some were useful, some were basic, none of them made me feel like I had been tricked. Caktus.ai was different. It was the first one that genuinely left me angry.
This is the full story of what happened when I signed up, paid, and tried to use Caktus.ai for my coursework.
The Sign-Up Looked Promising. The Reality Did Not Match.
I first heard about Caktus.ai from a video that kept popping up on my feed. The platform was being shown off as an all-in-one academic assistant with over forty tools for students. Essay writing, citation generation, math solving, coding help, discussion board posts. It looked like everything a student could need sitting inside one clean dashboard.
I went to the website and looked around. The homepage was polished. The feature list was impressive on paper. There used to be a free trial where you got a small number of characters to test the tool before paying. When I signed up, that trial was gone. There was no free option at all. To use anything meaningful on Caktus.ai, you had to pay first.
I told myself that was fine. A lot of good tools cost money. The monthly plan was listed at $19.99. I put in my card details, paid, and got access. Within about twenty minutes, I was already having doubts.
The Essay Output Was Not What I Expected
The first thing I tried was the essay writer. I had a business ethics paper due in two days and needed a solid draft to work from. I entered my topic, chose the word count, gave some context, and hit generate. The essay came back quickly. That part was fine.
But when I read through what it produced, I was surprised at how off it was. The writing style was decent enough but the content was all over the place. Paragraphs that were supposed to be about my specific topic kept drifting into vague, generic points that had very little to do with what I had asked for. One whole section discussed concepts that were not even related to the question I had given.
I tried again with a more specific prompt. Same issue. The essay came back looking structured from the outside but shallow and off-topic in the actual content. One reviewer described it perfectly: the tool can copy your writing style if you give it a sample, but the essay may contain information that has little or no relevance to the main topic. That was exactly what I experienced.
I spent more time cutting out irrelevant paragraphs and rewriting the remaining sections than the essay would have taken me to write from scratch. That is not a writing assistant. That is extra work dressed up as help.
The Citations Could Not Be Trusted
Citations are a serious thing in academic writing. Getting them wrong can get you in trouble. So I paid close attention to how Caktus.ai handled references when I used it for a research assignment.
The citations it generated looked correct at first glance. Proper formatting, author names, publication years. But when I went back and verified a few of them, I found problems. Some of the sources it cited did not match the claims being made in the text. One reference did not seem to exist at all when I searched for it. Another was a real paper but the information attributed to it in the essay was not actually in that paper.
For a student who trusts the tool and does not double-check every citation, this is dangerous. You could submit an assignment with fabricated or misattributed sources and not even know it. I had to go through every single reference manually before I could feel safe using the output. At that point I was not saving time. I was doing quality control on a tool I had paid money to use.
AI Detection Was a Real Risk
Caktus.ai markets itself heavily around academic integrity. The website talks about responsible AI use and how every feature encourages revision and comprehension. What it does not advertise clearly is that the content it produces can still be flagged by AI detection software.
I ran one of the essays through a detection tool and the AI score came back high. The writing pattern was recognizable as machine-generated. My university uses Turnitin and similar tools for submissions. If I had handed in the raw output without heavily rewriting it, I would have been at risk.
There is a humanizer feature on the platform but it does not fully fix the problem. After running the text through the humanizer and testing it again, the AI score dropped but was still not at a level I felt comfortable submitting. I ended up rewriting most of the essay anyway. So what exactly was I paying for?
Support Took Two Days to Respond and Said Nothing Useful
About a week into my subscription, the tool started behaving strangely. The essay generator was producing even shorter outputs than usual and cutting off mid-paragraph. I tried refreshing, logging out and back in, switching browsers. Nothing fixed it.
I sent a message to the support team explaining the issue. I waited. And waited. The reply came back almost two days later and it was clearly a copy-paste response. It told me to try clearing my cache and refreshing the page. I had already done both of those things before I even contacted them. The response did not address my actual problem and there was no follow-up.
Multiple students on forums have described the exact same experience. Slow replies, vague copy-paste answers, and issues that never actually get resolved. For a tool being used by students under deadline pressure, two-day response times with unhelpful replies are simply not acceptable.
Trying to Cancel Was Its Own Nightmare
After three weeks I had made up my mind. This tool was not worth the money. I went to cancel my subscription. What followed was one of the most frustrating experiences I have had with any online service.
The cancellation process was not straightforward. The settings page buried the option and when I tried to complete the cancellation, the billing page kept reloading without confirming anything. I was not sure if my cancellation had gone through or not. I sent an email to support to confirm. No reply came before the next billing cycle.
I was charged again. Then I had to go through the whole process again, this time more aggressively, and only got confirmation after following up multiple times.
I am not alone in this experience. Reviews on Trustpilot are full of students describing the same thing. People who canceled and got charged again months later. One user reported being charged four times after canceling over a year earlier. Another said they lost $180 to charges they thought had stopped long ago. One reviewer wrote that the platform makes it impossible to cancel on purpose. Reading those reviews after my own experience, I believe them.
The Billing Practices Are the Biggest Problem of All
The quality issues with the essay output were frustrating. The slow support was annoying. But the billing behavior is the thing that truly defines the Caktus.ai experience for a large number of users. And it is the most serious problem by a significant margin.
On Trustpilot, Caktus.ai has an overall rating of 1.9 out of 5. The majority of negative reviews mention billing as the central complaint. Users describe being charged after canceling. Students have reported seeing multiple charges appear on the same day. Others describe having their card charged for amounts different from the plan they signed up for. One student said Caktus.ai charged their account six times after they had canceled their subscription well over a year earlier.
What makes this worse is that Caktus.ai has responded to only 15 percent of negative reviews on Trustpilot. That is not a company taking its reputation seriously. That is a company that has decided ignoring complaints is an acceptable business strategy.
There is also no phone number you can call. No live chat for billing disputes. Just email, which as I discovered firsthand, can take days to get a response that does not actually help you. If you are a student on a tight budget and Caktus.ai decides to charge your card unexpectedly, your only option is to wait and hope someone eventually replies with something useful.
The Free Trial Was Gone When I Needed It
This one still bothers me. When Caktus.ai first launched, it offered a small free trial of around 5,000 characters so you could test the tool before committing. That trial no longer exists. It was discontinued without much announcement.
So you are being asked to pay $19.99 per month for a tool you have never tried, based entirely on marketing material and other people's reviews. That is not a fair position to put a student in. Most students cannot afford to experiment with a $20 monthly charge. When I paid without being able to test the tool first, I was taking a blind leap of faith. And it did not pay off.
An Update That Deleted My Work
One thing I came across from other students that I did not experience personally but that needs to be mentioned: Caktus.ai released an update at some point that affected the essay library without warning users in advance. Students who had saved generated essays and drafts inside the platform lost that work after the update.
No warning. No backup option. No way to recover the saved content. For students who rely on the platform to store their work, that kind of update is devastating. If you are paying for a service and trusting it to hold your academic work, the least you should expect is to be told before an update that might wipe it out.
What I Use Now Instead: MyEssayWriter.ai
After everything with Caktus.ai, I was honestly reluctant to try another AI writing tool. But a friend recommended MyEssayWriter.ai and eventually I gave it a chance. The difference was immediate and it was significant.
First, I could actually try it before paying anything. No card required upfront. No having to trust marketing copy and hope for the best. I just signed up and started using it. That alone felt like a completely different approach to how a student tool should work.
The essay I generated on the first try was clean, well-structured, and actually on topic. The arguments made sense. The paragraphs flowed naturally. I made a few small edits to add my own voice and it was ready to use. That was it. No hours of rewriting. No cutting out irrelevant content. No fact-checking fabricated citations.
Beyond the essay quality, the full toolkit that comes with MyEssayWriter.ai is genuinely useful for everyday student life:
- Essay Generator that produces full structured essays in about 90 seconds.
- Essay Outliner so you have a proper roadmap before you start writing.
- Paraphrasing Tool that rewrites text naturally without breaking the meaning.
- Content Humanizer that makes the output sound like a real person wrote it.
- Plagiarism Checker built right into the platform so you can verify before submitting.
- Citation Machine with support for APA, MLA, Chicago, and other formats.
- Grammar and Spelling Checker that polishes your work before it reaches your professor.
- AI Summarizer that condenses long articles and research papers into usable points.
- GPA Calculator to track academic performance all in one place.
With Caktus.ai I had a narrow tool with an unreliable output, a billing system that users describe as predatory, and support that barely functioned. With MyEssayWriter.ai I had a complete writing toolkit that did exactly what it said, charged me transparently starting at $4.99 per month, and never gave me a reason to worry about surprise charges on my card.
That is not a small difference. That is night and day.
My Honest Advice to Other Students
If you are a student who has been seeing Caktus.ai everywhere and wondering if it is worth trying, please read through the Trustpilot reviews before you enter your card details. Read the accounts of students who could not cancel their subscriptions. Read the ones about unexpected charges appearing months or years after they thought they had stopped the service. Make your decision based on that, not on a TikTok video or a polished homepage.
The tool itself has quality problems too. Essays that go off topic. Citations that cannot be trusted without manual checking. Content that still gets flagged by AI detectors despite the humanizer feature. Support that takes days to reply and often says nothing useful when it does. An update history that has previously wiped out student work without warning.
Put all of that together and you get a platform that charges nearly $20 a month for an experience that creates more stress than it removes.
I paid for Caktus.ai and regretted it almost immediately. Save yourself the same experience and choose something that actually works.
