Every word you forge is yours to keep, with no subscription to surrender.
Every screen below is pulled straight from the working app: real windows, real data, nothing staged.
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.
Magic items, ships, spells, a timeline of events: if your story needs a sheet Alistair doesn't have, make it. The visual builder lets you click fields onto a page and link them to your characters and places, with no code. Its sheets know your story: they list who could carry an item, look up its maker's role, work out its strength, find every chapter that mentions it, and make new documents at the press of a button, after asking you. Want more? The code builder writes templates in HTML, CSS and JavaScript: a cast board, a scene tracker, a word-goal dashboard.
Give every character a distinct voice, clone or blend your own, and listen to your book come alive, entirely offline.
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 a language model. 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.
Choose the language you write in, or let Alistair work it out from each scene. Spelling, dialogue and read-aloud all follow it.
Same page, same paragraph. Click a tab and the panel changes while your cursor stays right where you left it.
Drop an inline note on any passage without ever leaving the page.
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 →
Your writing stays on your computer, not on someone else's server waiting to be mined or metered by subscription.
Pay once, own it for life. The price you see today is the price you'll ever pay.
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.