Because the only recurring cost should be coffee.
Every screen below is pulled straight from the working app. No mockups, no smoke.
Skip the empty dashboard entirely. Alistair opens straight into your last project, with every manuscript, character sheet, and world file waiting exactly where you left it.
Real formatting control wrapped in a page built for prose: custom fonts, adjustable line height, live word counts, and autosave that never once interrupts the sentence you're writing.
A dedicated screenplay editor with its own toolbar: click Scene, Action, Character, or Dialogue and the line formats itself to spec, every time, no punctuation to memorize.
Compile every scene into a properly formatted manuscript in a single pass, title page and all, then send it straight to PDF, DOCX, or a real EPUB e-book without ever touching a template.
Build a living map of your cast: relationships, traits, and motivations that stay tethered to the very scenes where your characters come alive.
Districts fold into buildings, buildings into rooms. Every location carries its own notes and scene links, so your world holds together even as it grows.
One board holds your plot, your character arcs, your world-building, and your tone, all filterable and lined up chapter by chapter.
Set a daily word-count goal and Alistair tracks the rest: a running streak, a full-year activity heatmap, and an always-visible dashboard that makes showing up again tomorrow feel worth it.
Publishers are starting to ask authors for real evidence a manuscript wasn't generated wholesale by AI. Verified Writing keeps a tamper-evident record of how your manuscript grew over time, then exports a signed report anyone can check independently, entirely offline.
Same page, same paragraph — click a tab and only the panel changes. Nothing here interrupts your writing.
Drop an inline note on any passage without ever leaving the page.
Give every character a distinct voice, clone or blend your own, and listen to your book come alive, entirely offline.
Assign a distinct voice to every character in your cast, once, in their profile.
Clone a voice from a short sample, or blend two built-in voices at a custom ratio.
Play, pause, skip between chunks, and scrub to any point in the reading.
Save the full narrated reading as a WAV file to listen to anywhere.
A dedicated toolbar button means no document has to be open first.
Every voice runs locally on your machine. Nothing is ever uploaded.
See how we compare across the features that actually matter to authors
| Feature | Alistair $60 once | Scrivener $60 | Atticus $147 | Ulysses $6.99/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing & Privacy | ||||
| One-time purchase | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| 100% offline - data never leaves your machine | ✓ | ✓ | - | - |
| Free updates forever | ✓ | - | - | - |
| LLM & ML Analysis | ||||
| Offline LLM - local model, no API key | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Voice cloning & full-cast audiobook | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Text-to-speech (26 voices, offline) | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Continuity checker (contradictions & name variants) | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Character interview (LLM, in-character) | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Inline prose analysis (Kill Your Darlings) | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Writing & Organisation | ||||
| Manuscript compiler (PDF & DOCX) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| World-building & lore templates | ✓ | partial | - | - |
| Writing goals & manuscript analytics | ✓ | partial | - | - |
| File-based collaboration (no server) | ✓ | - | - | - |
| Trust & Authorship | ||||
| Tamper-evident authorship verification | ✓ | - | - | - |
← Swipe to compare Atticus & Ulysses →
Alistair is the only writing tool that unifies manuscript editing, story arc planning, character mapping, offline LLM inference, local text-to-speech with zero-shot voice cloning, full-cast audiobook playback, continuity checking, file-based collaboration, and per-scene analytics in a single one-time purchase - with no cloud, no subscription, and no limits on which models you run.
Everything you need to know before you download
After 30 days Alistair will prompt you to activate a license. All your projects and data remain untouched - nothing is locked or deleted. Purchase a license at any time and enter the key to unlock the app permanently.
Yes. Alistair supports any GGUF-quantized model - download one through the app or import your own. No API key, no account, no cloud. Inference runs entirely on your hardware via llama.cpp with optional CUDA GPU acceleration.
No. Both the LLM and text-to-speech engines run 100% locally on your machine. After the initial one-time model download, everything works fully offline. Your manuscript never leaves your computer.
Alistair requires Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). An NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support is recommended for faster LLM inference and TTS - but it is not required. Both features automatically fall back to CPU if no compatible GPU is detected, so Alistair runs on any modern Windows machine.
Alistair requires macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later on Apple Silicon (M1 and newer) - Intel Macs aren't supported. Local LLM inference automatically uses Apple's Metal GPU acceleration, no extra download or setup required.
Yes - Linux is actively in development (Mac is already available today). If you purchase now for Windows or Mac, your license will transfer to Linux at no extra cost when it releases. Sign up below to be notified the moment it's available.
Every feature added to Alistair - new tools, bug fixes, performance improvements - is included with your one-time purchase at no additional cost. There will never be a paid upgrade or a v2.0 paywall. You buy it once and you own it.
Founder & Lead Developer
"Engineer by training, storyteller at heart, father and husband above all."
I've always written. Not always well, not always consistently - but the urge was always there. What kept getting in the way wasn't the words, it was the tools. Every app I tried was either a stripped-down notepad that lost my structure, or a feature wall that buried the actual writing under menus and panels. I'd spend twenty minutes setting up a workspace before typing a single sentence. That's not writing. That's administration.
In 2024 I stopped looking for the right tool and started building it. The first version was just a clean editor with a folder tree - something I could open and immediately write in. But the longer I used it, the more it grew: character sheets, a story arc builder, analytics, an offline LLM that actually knew my manuscript. Each feature was something I needed myself. Nothing was added because it looked good in a feature list.
To build the writing app that every writer deserves - one that respects your privacy, earns its price once and never asks again, and gets out of the way when you need to write. Not a platform. Not a subscription. Just a tool that does exactly what it promises, runs entirely on your machine, and keeps getting better as long as I'm writing too.
Your writing stays on your computer. No cloud storage, no data mining, no subscriptions.
One reasonable price for lifetime access. No hidden fees, no recurring charges.
Every feature is designed based on real writing needs from myself and our community.
I'm actively developing Alistair with input from our user community.
Have a feature request? Email me directly - I read every message.