Novelcrafter
Novelcrafter is a browser-based novel writing platform pairing a manuscript editor, story planning views and an auto-linking world wiki called the Codex. AI is bring-your-own-key: you connect your own model provider. Plans start at 4 USD monthly.
What is Novelcrafter?
Novelcrafter is a web-based writing platform built for long-form fiction, with nothing to install and around 220,000 authors claimed on its homepage. It rests on three connected pillars. The manuscript side is a rich text editor with a focus mode, highlighters, a marker timeline, sections, and a configurable interface that includes a dyslexia-friendly font and a dark theme. The planning side offers several views of the same story: a Grid for dragging acts, chapters and scenes into order, a spreadsheet-like Matrix showing the whole book at once, a single-page Outline, scene labels, custom points of view and a scene archive. The third pillar, the Codex, is a wiki of characters, places and lore that tracks and links entries automatically and can be shared across every book in a series.
AI runs on a strict bring-your-own-key model. The subscription buys the software, never the inference: no AI credits are included, and users connect their own account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta Llama, Mistral AI or OpenRouter — or run models entirely on their own machine through LM Studio or Ollama. Once a provider is connected, the platform generates prose from scene beats, summarises scenes, extracts characters into the Codex and opens a Workshop Chat that sees the novel's context. The prompting system is fully customisable.
The publisher frames the product as an assistant rather than a substitute, describing a platform that helps you write rather than a one-click solution that writes for you. Beyond novels, the homepage claims non-fiction, poetry, short stories, screenplays, articles, newsletters, ad copy, fanfic, academic work and game design, and a dedicated genre guide covers romance and NSFW writing. Collaboration allows inviting readers, editors or co-authors, with teams reserved for the top tier.
Around the product sits a substantial free layer: structured courses, a monthly newsletter, a blog, documentation, an extensive FAQ, a Discord community, a YouTube channel with weekly office hours, a public roadmap and a status page. Manuscripts import from Word, Markdown or HTML and export back out. The publisher is a small bootstrapped German company.
What it does
- Organise characters, locations and lore in a Codex wiki that links itself to the manuscript
- Plan acts, chapters and scenes, then reorder them by drag and drop
- Turn a handful of scene beats into prose using the AI model of your choice
- Summarise scenes and extract characters straight into the Codex
- Connect an OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral or OpenRouter key, or run a model locally
- Share one Codex across every book in a series
- Invite a proofreader, editor or co-author onto a manuscript
When to use Novelcrafter / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Novelcrafter is the right fit.
When to use Novelcrafter
- Novelists writing series or shared universes who need a story bible that stays in sync with the manuscript
- Indie and self-published authors looking for a low, predictable monthly cost
- Writers who already use LLMs and want to choose their own model, provider and prompts
- Privacy-minded authors who would rather run a local model through Ollama or LM Studio than send text to a cloud vendor
- Romance and NSFW authors, who get a dedicated genre guide and unrestricted choice of model
When not to use Novelcrafter
- Anyone looking for a free tool: there is no permanent free plan, only a 21-day trial
- Writers who expect AI to work out of the box, without opening an account with a model vendor and paying for tokens separately
- Authors after a one-click manuscript generator, since the publisher deliberately builds the opposite
- Writers working in right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew or Urdu, which the formatting does not support
- Organisations that require a signed DPA, a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, or strictly EU-only hosting
How to use Novelcrafter
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign up for the 21-day free trial — no credit card, and every feature is unlocked
- Work straight in the browser; there is nothing to install
- Import an existing manuscript from Word, Markdown or HTML, or start a fresh novel
- Build the Codex: add characters, places and lore, or extract entries automatically from snippets and scenes
- Lay the story out in the Grid, then check it against the Matrix and Outline views
- Write directly in the editor, or drop scene beats with the '/' key
- To use AI, open an account with a model vendor, buy credits there, generate an API key and paste it into Novelcrafter (Hobbyist tier or above)
- Alternatively, point Novelcrafter at a local model served by LM Studio or Ollama
- Open Workshop Chat to brainstorm against the novel's own context (Artisan tier or above)
- Invite a proofreader, editor or co-author, or set up a writing team (Specialist tier)
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Low entry price: 4 USD a month already buys unlimited books, the Codex and series support
- No lock-in to a single AI vendor, and local models mean the text need never leave your machine
- The publisher states it never trains models on user content and never stores or logs prompts
- Intellectual property stays with the author, AI-generated passages included, written into the terms
- Subprocessors are published in full with location and purpose, alongside a dated change history
- 21-day trial of every feature without a card, a pausable subscription, and read-only access retained after cancellation
- A genuinely large free learning layer: courses, documentation, FAQ, Discord and weekly YouTube office hours
Cons
- No permanent free plan — the vendor says so outright
- No AI credits are included, so the real monthly cost is the subscription plus whatever the model vendor charges
- The 4 USD Scribe tier has no AI at all; Workshop Chat starts at 14 USD and collaboration at 20 USD
- Web only: no native iOS or Android app, and no public Novelcrafter API
- Right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are not supported by the formatting
- No DPA, no named data protection officer and no security certification; data may sit in the United States and several subprocessors are US-based
- The terms have not been revised since September 2023, and support comes from a five-person team on European hours
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Novelcrafter offers a 21-day free trial of every feature, with no credit card required, after which a paid subscription is necessary. The lowest price point is the Scribe tier at 4.00 USD per month on monthly billing; prices are localised by region, and annual billing is advertised as two months free. It should be noted that no AI usage is included at any tier: model credits are purchased separately from whichever provider the user connects.
- unlimited books
- Codex
- series and basic reviewing tools
- with Discord and email support
- no AI features
- everything in Scribe plus bring-your-own-key AI
- scene summarisation
- character extraction
- generation from scene beats and live chat support
- everything in Hobbyist plus Workshop Chat and advanced reviewing tools (announced as planned)
- everything in Artisan plus collaborative writing
- inviting users to novels and series
- team creation and management
- and priority support
- Annual billing on any tier is advertised as two months off
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Novelcrafter handles your data.
GDPR overview
Novelcrafter claims GDPR compliance explicitly: the privacy policy opens by stating that its practices follow the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The publisher is established in Hamburg, Germany, so no Article 27 representative is required. The policy sets out the rights it recognises — access, rectification, erasure, objection, withdrawal of consent, portability and complaint to a supervisory authority — and commits to notifying users and the regulator of high-risk breaches. Website analytics run cookie-free through Fathom, with Article 6(1)(f) legitimate interest cited as the legal basis. Concrete gaps remain: no data processing agreement is published or offered on request, no data protection officer is named, and no transfer safeguards are mentioned for the several US subprocessors. All privacy requests go to a single generic support address. Last updated 20 February 2025.
Who owns the data?
Novelcrafter's terms are unusually clear on ownership. Section 6 states that anything users create, write or upload remains their intellectual property, and it names content generated by the platform's AI features explicitly: the company claims no rights over it. Only material Novelcrafter itself supplies stays the company's. The privacy policy reinforces this by ruling out any use of user novels or creative content to train machine learning models. If a subscription lapses, work is not held hostage — the account falls back to read-only and everything can still be viewed and exported. Account deletion can be requested at any time.
Reuse rights
Users may reuse their own output freely and without asking permission. The terms grant Novelcrafter no licence over user content, AI-generated passages included, so a manuscript can be published, sold or adapted commercially with no clause to clear first. Export is available on every tier and stays open in read-only mode after a subscription ends. On the vendor's side, use of user data is narrow: account details and usage telemetry serve support, product improvement and analytics; prompt metadata such as type, length, vendor, model and token cost is measured, but the prompt text itself is never stored or logged; and nothing is sold, rented or traded to third parties for their own marketing purposes.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Novelcrafter hosts on Amazon Web Services, with the privacy policy giving the location as EU (Frankfurt) or United States and naming the European Union as the primary data location. Section 6 states plainly that data may be stored in either the EU or the US, so transatlantic transfer is possible by design rather than by exception. Content delivery runs through Bunny CDN across EU and US nodes. The subprocessor table is published in full, with each service's location and purpose. European services include customer.io, Sentry, Linear, Slack, Tally.so and PostHog; United States services include Clerk, which stores user accounts and profile data, along with Zapier, dub.co, Canny.io, Intercom, Lemon Squeezy and the affiliate platform Tolt. Payments are handled by Paddle/ProfitWell as merchant of record from the UK and EEA, having replaced Lemon Squeezy in April 2024. Analytics come from Fathom (EU/US, cookie-free) and PostHog (EU, pseudonymised only). The company describes industry-standard encryption and secure protocols for traffic to user devices. No standard contractual clauses, adequacy mechanism or data processing agreement is mentioned anywhere for the US transfers, and no hosting certification is claimed.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Novelcrafter.
- The headline price misleads by omission: with no AI credits included, a heavy user can spend more on model tokens than on the subscription itself
- Leaning on generation from scene beats can quietly erode the drafting habit — the tool is designed to assist, but nothing stops it being used to avoid writing altogether
- Prose produced by a general-purpose model carries recognisable tics, which the help centre itself calls AI-isms, and readers increasingly spot them
- Your API key and your token spend sit with a third-party vendor whose terms Novelcrafter does not control, and whose stance on retention and training may differ sharply from Novelcrafter's own
- Data may be stored in the United States and passes through several US subprocessors with no transfer safeguards mentioned; an unpublished manuscript deserves a moment's thought
- No DPA, no named data protection officer and no security certification, which rules the tool out for organisations with formal compliance requirements
- A five-person bootstrapped company with no outside funding raises a durability question for a manuscript you intend to work on for years — export regularly
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for the platform, moderate for the AI. Novelcrafter is a pure web app: sign up, and the 21-day trial opens every feature with no card and nothing to install. The real hurdle is the bring-your-own-key step — creating an account with a model vendor, buying credits, generating an API key and pasting it in. The help centre explains API keys and BYOK and points to OpenRouter as the easiest route. Local models through LM Studio or Ollama are noticeably more technical and may require enabling CORS. No coding is needed for ordinary use.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Novelcrafter
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Novelcrafter.
Frequently asked questions
Does Novelcrafter include its own AI?
Is there a free plan?
What does it really cost to get started?
Will my writing be used to train AI models?
Who owns text that the AI generates?
What happens to my novels if I stop paying?
Where is my data hosted?
Which languages can I write in?
Is there a mobile app or an API?
Should you pick Novelcrafter?
Novelcrafter is a mature, well-documented product rather than a promise. The help centre, free course catalogue, public roadmap, status page and dated changelog point to a team that ships and explains what it ships, and the company behind it is properly identified: a registered German UG in Hamburg, bootstrapped, five people, no outside investors.
Its defining choice is the bring-your-own-key model, and it cuts both ways. It buys real freedom — any major vendor, any OpenRouter model, or nothing but a local model on your own hardware — and keeps the subscription cheap. It also means the advertised price is not the price you pay. Scribe at 4 USD has no AI whatsoever, AI starts at 8 USD, and on top of either you fund your own tokens at a vendor you set up yourself.
On data the posture is unusually favourable. The terms leave intellectual property with the author, AI output included; the privacy policy rules out training on user content and says prompts are never stored; subprocessors are published in full. The gaps are compliance gaps rather than intent gaps: no DPA, no named officer, no certification, no transfer safeguards mentioned for the several US services in the chain, and hosting that may land in the United States despite an EU-primary default. A publisher with a procurement checklist will notice; an individual novelist mostly will not.
For series writers, worldbuilders and authors who already know their way around a model provider, this is a strong fit at a low price. For anyone wanting AI included, a free tier, a native mobile app, an API or right-to-left support, it is not. Two things deserve a second look before committing: the terms have not been revised since September 2023, and support is a small team on European hours.
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