Inkwell is free, local-first writing software — no account, no subscription

Inkwell is Limelight’s chapter-first writing app for novels and long manuscripts. After a round of product simplification in the public repo, the promise is sharper:

Draft. Format. Publish — for free, on your machine.

No account. No subscription. No cloud sync backend. No upsell gated behind a paywall.

What changed

We removed the billing and cloud-sync surfaces that were pulling the product away from its core job. In practice that means:

• No Paddle / paid upgrade flow in the app
• No Supabase auth or cloud sync as a product requirement
• Exports unlocked — EPUB, print-ready PDF, DOCX, Markdown, and plain text without a “pro” gate
• Local-only manuscripts in the browser or Windows desktop app, with portable .inkwell.zip backups you control

If you want a writing tool that stays out of your way and does not ask you to rent your own chapters back from a SaaS dashboard, this is the version we meant to ship.

Who Inkwell is for

Inkwell is built for people who think in chapters, not nested folders:

• new authors finishing a first manuscript
• novelists who want a calm spine of chapters instead of a document swamp
• self-publishers who need EPUB and print-ready PDF when the draft is ready

You can start writing without creating an account. Your library stays on the device until you export it.

Local-first on purpose

“Local-first” here is not a slogan. It is the architecture:

1. Your manuscript lives in local storage (web) or the desktop app.
2. Backups are files you export — not a silent sync you hope is correct.
3. There is no subscription to renew before you can open yesterday’s chapter.

That is a deliberate tradeoff. You lose multi-device cloud sync. You gain ownership, simplicity, and a tool that still works when the network does not.

Try Inkwell

Open the web app or grab the Windows build from GitHub Releases:

Open Inkwell →

Write the next chapter. Export when you are ready. Keep the files.