Frequently asked questions

Yes, and it takes about twenty seconds. Your document is saved to your account as you type, which is what makes autosave, multiple versions and coming back tomorrow possible. You can register with an e-mail address and password or with a Google account. No card is requested at any point on the free plan.

Actually free. The free plan gives you the complete editor, 16 templates, 2 saved CVs and 5 real PDF downloads every month, with no trial countdown and no watermark across your work. The only thing we add is one small credit line at the very bottom of the exported PDF, which the paid plans remove.

About fifteen minutes if your dates and job titles are to hand, and closer to forty-five if you are writing your achievement bullets from scratch. The formatting takes none of that time — you pick a template and the layout is already decided.

Yes. Every template can be opened pre-filled with a complete, realistic example CV so you can see what belongs in each field before you replace it with your own text. It is far easier to edit a good example than to face an empty form.

There are 12 built-in sections: summary, work experience, education, skills, languages, projects, certifications, awards, volunteering, publications, interests and references. You can reorder them, rename their headings and switch any of them off without deleting the content. Paid plans add up to six custom sections of your own.

The site works on any modern browser and you can review and make small edits on a phone. We will be honest though: writing a full CV means looking at a full page next to a form, so a laptop or tablet is a much better experience. Nothing is locked on mobile — it is simply a small canvas for an A4 document.

Mostly convention and paper. A resume is usually one page on US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) for the United States and Canada; a CV is often two pages on A4 (210 × 297 mm) elsewhere, and in academia it is longer still. Both are the same document type in this builder — choose a template suited to your market and set the paper size to match.

56 templates in six families: modern, corporate, creative, technology, classic and a dedicated ATS family. 16 are available on the free plan and the remaining 40 are included with any paid plan. Every template renders the same content structure, so none of them is a downgrade in what it can hold.

Yes, as often as you like, and you will not lose a word. Your content and your styling are stored as two separate objects, so switching template replaces only the styling. Try six layouts in a minute and go back to the first one unchanged.

An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to receive and search applications. It reads your PDF and tries to turn it back into structured fields. We cannot promise your CV will parse perfectly everywhere, because ATS software is dozens of different products configured differently by each employer, and any builder that guarantees otherwise is overselling. What we can control is the part that reliably breaks parsers.

23 of the 56 templates score 5/5 on our published checklist — single column, no text baked into graphics, real structural headings and ordinary bullet characters — and 15 of those are on the free plan. The dedicated ATS family has 6 templates, 5 of them free, and is stripped back on purpose. Every template page shows its score so you can decide with your eyes open.

For a strongly parser-driven application, yes — a sidebar is frequently read out of order, which is how a skills list ends up merged into your job title. For a design, marketing or agency role where a human opens the file first, a two-column layout can be exactly right. The default template for a new document is single column, and you have to choose a two-column layout deliberately.

It depends entirely on where you are applying. Photos are normal in much of continental Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, and are actively discouraged in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia, where they can create a discrimination risk for the employer. The photo is a single toggle, so you can keep one CV with and one without.

The accent colour, paper size, photo shape and date format are available on every plan, including free. Font family (15 to choose from), text size, line height, section spacing, page margins, heading case, icon display and skill display style are paid-plan controls — those are the tools for fitting a stubborn CV onto one page.

A PDF containing real, selectable, searchable text with an embedded font — never an image of your CV. It is rendered by a headless Chromium from exactly the markup you saw in the preview, so the file matches the screen.

No, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it. The builder exports PDF only. PDF is what the overwhelming majority of employers and job boards ask for, and it is the only format that guarantees your layout survives the trip. If an application form insists on a .docx upload, you will need to rebuild it in a word processor for that one submission.

5 per calendar month on the free plan, resetting on the 1st, and unlimited on Pro and Lifetime. A download only counts once a file has actually been produced, so a failed or cancelled export never eats into your allowance. Your dashboard shows the counter and the reset date.

No watermark, and nothing across your content. Free exports carry a single small line at the very bottom of the page reading “Made with CreateCVOnline”. Paid plans remove it. There is nothing over the preview while you work, on any plan.

Both, and it is set per document rather than per account. A4 (210 × 297 mm) is standard across Europe, Africa and most of Asia; US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is standard in the United States and Canada — wider and slightly shorter, which is enough to move your last line onto a second page if you pick the wrong one.

The preview shows page breaks as you edit, at the true page size, so you can see the problem before you download. Section headings are kept with the content beneath them, and a role is not split so that only its dates land on the next page. If you are two lines over, the spacing and font-size controls on the paid plans are usually a cleaner fix than deleting a job.

Yes. There is a dedicated print view that uses the same stylesheet as the export, so printing from your browser gives the same page as the PDF.

On the paid plans, yes. Publishing a CV gives you a link with an unguessable identifier that renders the document in a browser. You can unpublish at any time — and unpublishing keeps working even after a paid period ends, so you can never be stuck with something public.

The Free plan costs nothing and never expires. Pro is 9.00 USD for 31 days of access. Lifetime is 69.00 USD once, with no expiry. Paid plans unlock all 56 templates, unlimited CVs, unlimited downloads, full typography control, custom sections, a share link and a PDF with no credit line.

No. Every payment is a single, deliberate PayPal transaction. We do not store a payment method and we do not create a recurring agreement, so there is no subscription to find and cancel. When the 31 days are up, the account quietly returns to the free plan.

There is nothing to cancel — simply do not buy another period. No cancellation form, no retention offer, no e-mail exchange. If you would like the current period refunded instead, see the refund question below.

Checkout runs through PayPal. You can pay from a PayPal balance or a linked bank account, and PayPal itself accepts debit and credit cards at checkout, so you do not need a PayPal account to buy. Your card details are entered on PayPal’s pages; they never touch our servers and we never store them.

Prices are shown and charged in USD. If your account is in a different currency, PayPal or your bank converts at their rate and may add a cross-border fee, which is outside our control. Any sales tax or VAT that applies to your country is shown by PayPal before you confirm.

Yes — within 14 days of the payment, for any reason at all, including simply changing your mind or finding a job the same week. E-mail support@createcvonline.com from the address on the account and we refund the full amount through PayPal, normally within two working days. You keep every CV you made.

Nothing is deleted and nothing is locked away. Your documents stay in your account and you keep access to all of them. Free-plan limits apply again from that moment, so a CV built on a paid template renders with the default template and default styling until you upgrade. Your words are never modified.

Access is granted only after our server has confirmed the capture with PayPal directly, so a slow confirmation can leave a short gap. Reload the confirmation page first. If it still has not applied, e-mail support@createcvonline.com with the PayPal transaction id and we will fix it the same day — we can see the order in our own ledger.

In Google Cloud Firestore, through Firebase, under your user account. Your documents are private by default and are only reachable by anyone else if you deliberately publish a share link. Accounts and sign-in are handled by Firebase Authentication — we never see or store your password.

No. We do not sell or rent personal data, we do not run advertising against it, and your CV content is not used to train models. Staff access to stored documents is limited to what is needed to investigate a specific problem you have reported to us.

Both, from your account settings. Deletion is real deletion: it removes your authentication record, your profile, every CV you have made and your payment history — not a flag on a row we keep. It cannot be undone, so export anything you want to keep first.

One strictly necessary cookie that keeps you signed in — it is httpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, and it holds a session token, not your CV. Analytics cookies are only ever set if the operator of this deployment has configured an analytics measurement id, and analytics collects event names and low-cardinality properties only: never CV content, e-mail addresses or free text you typed.

It is unguessable rather than password-protected: anyone who has the link can open it, which is the point of being able to paste it into an e-mail. It is not listed anywhere on the site. Switch sharing off and the link stops working immediately.

PayPal. We store the order id, the plan, the amount and the status so we can support you and honour refunds. We never receive your card number, and we do not store one.

Use the contact form or e-mail support@createcvonline.com. Every message is read and answered by a person, normally the same day and always within two working days.