No subscriptions. No interruptions. A lifelong haven for your stories.
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.
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 the panel changes while your cursor stays right where you left it.
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, processed entirely on your own hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.