Every wordstillyours.
Perkins is a desktop studio for novelists, essayists, and screenwriters — with an AI editorial team that coaches like a great editor: principles, master examples, hard questions. It never writes your prose. That isn't a setting. It's the product.
Free while in development · Your files stay on your machine
Charles set the small parcel on the table between them and did not sit down. The gulls were loud over the hangar roof, and Eve found she was counting their cries rather than looking at the paper wrapping.
“He wanted you to have it,” Charles said. “At the end. It was nearly the only thing he said.”
The reader knows Charles was not at the airfield when Robert died — Eve doesn't. That gap is your engine. Hold it two more beats before she opens the parcel.
Principle, not rewriteNamed for Maxwell Perkins — the editor who made Hemingway better without writing a line of him.
No “apply rewrite.” Anywhere.
Editorial feedback arrives as a principle, a goal, and a master-author example — never replacement sentences. There is no mechanism in Perkins that can move AI text into your manuscript. Not a toggle. Not a tier. Structural.
Your metadata, your yes.
The assistant can draft synopses, link your world bible, infer story dates, and map plot threads — as proposals you accept field by field. Cancel, and not one byte was written.
A folder of Markdown you own.
Every scene, note, and codex entry is a plain text file on your machine. Open the folder in any editor, forever. Perkins organizes it; it never captures it.
One studio. Every shape a book takes.
Each format brings its own structure — a novel's chapters and scenes, an essay's sections, a screenplay's acts — with matching metadata, statuses, and compile rules. And if your form doesn't exist yet, define it: upload a template and Perkins builds the studio around it.
Five editors read your scene. None of them touch it.
The Reader
Experiences your scene as a first-time reader — what they know, suspect, feel, and carry forward. Deliberately isolated from your voice notes so the cold read stays honest.
The Structure Editor
Exact sentence rhythms, dialogue mechanics, period accuracy, continuity — quantified diagnostics computed from your actual prose, not vibes.
The Voice Editor
Protects your voice profile and influence blend, watches prose musicality against your own rhythm system, and flags anything drifting toward the generic.
The Connections Editor
Finds the linkages you might miss — mirrored scenes, unpaid setups, orphaned payoffs, plot threads drifting apart — and suggests them in the relationship graph for your one-click confirm or dismiss.
The Senior Editor
Forms an independent view, then weighs every junior's findings into one prioritized editorial letter with a readiness score — the desk where it all comes together.
Every persona is editable. Add editors, remove them, route each to a different AI model — a frugal reader, a premium synthesizer. Your masthead, your rules.
Draft, plan, and revise a whole book in one calm place.
Write
- A serif-first Markdown editor — focus mode, typewriter scroll
- Flow view — a chapter as one continuous page
- Snapshots & version history — diff and revert any scene
- Split pane — notes, codex, or an editor's letter beside your draft
- Read-aloud — test the rhythm by ear
- Images & media on any page
Plan
- Corkboard & Kanban — cards by status, act, or POV
- Outliner — every scene, every field, one grid
- Timeline — reading order and story-world chronology
- Plotlines & plot grid — threads as a subway map
- Codex & relationship graph — your world, cross-referenced
- Setup/payoff tracker — Chekhov's ledger, kept
Coach
- Full editorial reviews — five perspectives, one letter
- Editorial inbox — every note tracked to your line
- Voice Health panel — rhythm, vocabulary, AI-tell checks, offline & free
- Assisted actions — codex, dates, synopses, proposed for your yes
- Readiness scores — watch a scene earn its “done”
- Batch reviews — send every “revised” scene to the desk
Nothing about your studio is fixed. Nothing about anyone else's is yours.
Your editors
Rewrite any editor's persona, clone one, add your own, or retire the whole desk. Route each editor to a different AI model — a frugal reader, a premium synthesizer.
Your voice
A voice profile built from passages of your own writing, with an influence blend you weight yourself. The editors protect it; they never average it away.
Your masters
The reference library maps craft problems to the authors you'd study for them. Curate it — add the writers who taught you, remove the ones who didn't.
Your rhythm system
Name your prose registers and their rules — or turn the whole system off. The rhythm visualizer colors your sentences by your definitions, not ours.
Your workflow
Statuses, colors, tags, codex categories, review thresholds, banned vocabulary — every vocabulary in the studio is editable, per writer and per project.
Your studios, plural
A spare thriller and a lyrical memoir shouldn't share an editor. Any project can override your voice, rhythm, and team — without touching your defaults.
Your manuscript never has an account.
Perkins runs on your machine and stores everything in a folder you choose. Version it with your own GitHub repository. Sync it through your own cloud folder. Or keep it on one laptop, off the grid entirely.
Honest numbers, because you'll see them anyway.
Perkins is free while in development. AI reviews run on your own API key, so you pay your model provider directly — a built-in cost meter shows the price of every review. A full five-editor review of a scene typically runs from under a dollar to about two dollars on premium models, and well under fifty cents with a frugal team. Local models cost nothing at all.
If Perkins is ever licensed, one promise is already written into its architecture: a lapsed license can never lock your manuscript. Opening, writing, exporting, and syncing your work are permanently ungated.
Fair questions.
Will this make my book read like AI wrote it?
Which AI models does it use?
Can I bring my Scrivener project?
What happens to my files if Perkins disappears?
Write the book. Keep every word.
Free while in development. macOS, Windows, and Linux.