Novelcrafter Review: What It Costs, How the AI Is Billed, and What You Can Export

Novelcrafter is a planning and writing app for novelists that charges a low monthly fee for the software and expects you to connect your own AI key for the AI features. That makes it a good fit for authors who want to choose their AI vendor, and a poor fit for anyone who wants one bill and no setup.

Plans and trial

Novelcrafter lists four monthly plans on its pricing page as of 2026-11-08: Scribe at $4, Hobbyist at $8, Artisan at $14 and Specialist at $20. The page offers a 21-day free trial, with no credit card required and all features unlocked, and says it does not offer a free plan. Annual prices are not shown; the page says only "2 Months off" for annual billing. It also says it offers no student, educator, non-profit or holiday discounts.

The comparison table on that page shows these differences between tiers:

• Scribe: unlimited books, the Codex, series and basic review tools. Bring-your-own-key is "No", so no AI features.
• Hobbyist: bring-your-own-key, AI scene summarization, AI character extraction, generating from scene beats, and live chat support.
• Artisan: adds workshop chat. Advanced reviewing tools are listed for this tier but marked "planned".
• Specialist: adds inviting other users to your novels and series, creating and managing teams, and priority support. Advanced reviewing tools are again marked "planned".

The table, as read on 2026-11-08, lists the Hobbyist AI items and the priority-support row. The plan cards and the table are not identical: the Hobbyist card summarizes the AI tier as "AI (Bring your own Key)", and the Artisan and Scribe cards list "Advanced Review features" and "Series & Universes" without the "planned" label the table applies. Where they differ, treat the table as the more specific statement and ask support before paying for a feature you are buying the plan for.

What "planned" means on this page

The pricing page marks two things as planned. Universes is marked planned on all four tiers, so a feature the Scribe card advertises is not shown as available. Advanced reviewing tools are marked planned on Artisan and Specialist. The page does not give a date for either. If you are choosing Artisan or Specialist for advanced review, you would be paying for a tier whose headline review feature the page says is not yet there; the 21-day trial lets you see what is actually switched on.

The second bill

AI use is billed by the provider you connect, not by Novelcrafter. Its AI cost page says you pay your chosen vendor directly, that per-token vendors price input and output separately, and that local models (through LM Studio or Ollama) cost nothing beyond electricity and are limited by your computer. It also names fixed-rate providers (featherlessAI, infermatic and Arli AI) that charge a flat monthly fee for unlimited use, with no amounts given. The help docs list connections for Anyscale Endpoints, Claude, Groq, LM Studio, Ollama, OpenAI, OpenRouter and an OpenAI-compatible option.

The cost page works through an example prompt: 1,982 words of prose, nine Codex entries (643 words) and 367 words of chapter summaries, which it counts as 4,176 input tokens with about 500 tokens (400 words) of output. It prices that prompt at $0.0200 on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, $0.00093 on GPT-4o mini and $0.1005 on Claude Opus. The page says its figures were correct as of November 2024, and it was last updated May 8, 2025, so those rates are old and the models are not today's. Check each vendor's current price list.

Two-bills arithmetic (an estimate)

This is our arithmetic on the cost page's example figures, not a measurement. It assumes the Hobbyist plan at $8 a month, a month of 100 prompts the size of the page's example, and the page's old per-prompt prices.

At 500 prompts a month the AI portion would be five times those figures: $10.00, $0.47 and $50.25. We do not know how many prompts a drafting month takes, and each longer or shorter prompt changes the sum. The lesson is the shape of the bill: the software fee is fixed, the AI portion moves with your habits and your model. Compare that with a flat credit subscription on the Sudowrite pricing explainer.

The Codex, import and export

The docs describe the Codex as a place for characters, locations and more, with "automatic tracking and progressions", and the index lists Codex types, aliases and mentions, series Codex, relations and progressions. AI for worldbuilding and series bibles covers keeping a bible in it.

Export is documented in the novel export guide: Word .docx and Markdown, with options to include everything or pick acts, chapters and scenes, export scene summaries, prose or both, and toggle act titles for Vellum or Atticus. The guide describes including the Codex in the whole-novel export and does not say whether other export types can include it. The help index also lists export guides for Scrivener and Atticus, and import for Word, Markdown and Apple Pages. Exported novels can be re-imported, though re-importing into the same book appends chapters rather than overwriting. For turning a manuscript into a finished book file, see best book formatting software, which owns that question.

Lock-in and switching costs

Your work is not trapped by the documented formats, but leaving has two limits. After a subscription ends you keep read-only access to your data, which you can view and export but not edit, according to the pricing page. And the export guide does not say whether export types other than the whole-novel export can include the Codex, so confirm what your export contains before relying on it. Because the AI runs on your own key, changing AI vendors costs nothing in the app, which is the main structural advantage over a tool with one built-in model.

Training and privacy

Novelcrafter's privacy policy, read on 2026-11-08 and displaying "Last updated August 31, 2026", says the company does "not, under any circumstances" use users' novels or creative content to train AI or machine learning models. It says data is stored on AWS, in the EU or US with the EU primary, that it does not store or log text content or prompts you send to the AI, and that it retains your data while your account is active and deletes on request subject to legal and business exceptions. It collects usage metrics on AI calls such as prompt type, character count, vendor, model, token amounts and cost.

The policy does not say what is sent to a provider you connect, and the vendor you connect has its own terms, which we have not read. Those govern what the AI provider does with the text it receives.

KDP

Prose a connected model generates that you keep is AI-generated text under KDP's rule, even after substantial edits. Use of the tool for planning or feedback is a different matter; see our KDP disclosure guide.

Downsides

• You must set up and pay for a separate AI account.
• Total cost is variable and depends on someone else's price list.
• The pricing page shows no annual prices and no free plan.
• Universes and advanced review features are marked "planned".
• Collaborators need a paid plan to add or edit data.
• The privacy policy does not cover what happens at the provider you connect.

What to confirm before paying

Run the 21-day trial with the model you intend to use and watch your provider's usage page, not Novelcrafter's. Ask support whether the feature you are buying a tier for is live. Check the annual price at checkout, since it is not shown. Read your chosen AI vendor's terms on training and retention.

Who should and should not use it

Use Novelcrafter if you like detailed story planning and want a say in which model reads your text. Skip it if you want a single flat subscription or no technical setup. For the comparison with Sudowrite and Claude see Sudowrite vs Novelcrafter vs Claude, and for the full field see best AI for fiction writers.

More tools and guides are in the AI drafting tools hub.

Last verified 2026-11-08. Rules and prices change: check the linked primary page before you rely on this.