In development

Ship every chapter on schedule.Know weeks ahead if you won't.

Leafbind is a desktop writing app for authors publishing on a cadence. It measures the pace you actually write at, tells you when your buffer runs dry, and gets each chapter out to every platform from one place.

Get monthly dev updates See how the forecast works →

$149 once when it ships · 60-day trial, no card · no subscription

Built for serial authors whose income depends on the next release landing on time.

ch-041-the-gate-reopens.md
038 — Ashfall
039 — Low Tide
040 — What the Tide Left
041 — The Gate Reopens
042 — Aftermath
Chapter 41 — The Gate Reopens
Ch. 40 posted to ✓ Royal Road ✓ Patreon • Scribble Hub — KDP vol. 3

Sound familiar?

The buffer is shrinking and you can't see it

You know roughly how many chapters are banked. You don't know whether that's six more weeks or nine more days at the rate you're really writing.

You find out you're behind in the week it matters

A word-count widget reports yesterday. It never tells you in February that the March release has already slipped out of reach.

Every release is the same manual hour

Royal Road, Patreon, your own site, the KDP bundle — the same words, reformatted and re-pasted one platform at a time, every single week.

Your back catalogue is locked in someone else's format

Six books and a million words inside a proprietary bundle or a hosted account. Nothing you can grep, diff, back up, or open in ten years without permission.

The core of the product

Every app counts words. Leafbind turns the count into a forecast.

A running total tells you what already happened. These three readouts answer the question you actually have — am I going to make it? — while there is still time to do something about the answer.

Buffer

Your 18-chapter buffer drains on 14 August.

Leafbind knows your release schedule and the rate you genuinely write at. It projects the day the stockpile hits zero and moves that date every time you write — or don't.

Finish date

At your current pace, Book 3 finishes 18 March.

Projected from your last thirty days of real output, not from the target you set optimistically in January. When the projection slips past your deadline, you hear about it in weeks, not days.

Momentum

742 words today · 4,100 this week · 2 sessions were revision.

The activity heatmap classifies every session as drafting, revising, or pasting, so a heavy editing day reads as work rather than as a flat line — and words written outside the app still count.

Writing a finite novel rather than a serial? Same app, no mode to switch. Without a release schedule the readout is simply the finish date instead of the buffer.

The rest of what a serial author's week needs

Drafting, structure, continuity, and release — in one app, over one folder of files, with nothing to sync between tools.

Publish everywhere from one place

Leafbind tracks what has gone out to which platform, per chapter, and hands you each destination's text correctly formatted for it. Schedule the week's releases once instead of repeating the same hour of copy-paste.

Your files are yours, forever

Every scene is a plain Markdown file with a YAML header, in an ordinary folder. Readable, greppable, diffable, and backed up by whatever you already trust. Nothing needs Leafbind to open it — including Leafbind's own metadata.

One universe, every book

Universe, series, book. Naming, dictionaries, typography, and genre conventions are set once and inherited down, overridable at any level. A twelve-book universe is the normal case here, not an upgrade tier.

A story bible that writes itself

Characters, places, and lore are extracted from the prose you already wrote, not filled into a parallel database that quietly rots the moment the draft diverges from it.

Structure that knows your genre

Per-scene length targets, chapter beats, and pacing expectations drawn from how your genre actually reads — progression fantasy paces nothing like a cozy mystery — and every one of them editable.

No AI in the core loop

Nothing is sent anywhere by default and nothing writes for you. If you want AI assistance you bring your own API key and turn it on. Drafting, tracking, and publishing work with none of it involved.

How Leafbind compares

Against the four tools a serial author is actually choosing between. Where one of them wins, the table says so.

Feature Leafbind Scrivener Obsidian + Longform Novelcrafter Atticus
Pace forecasting & finish-date ETA ✓ ◐ — — —
Release-schedule buffer tracking ✓ — — — —
Multi-platform publishing with per-chapter sync state ✓ — — — —
Manuscript is plain files you can read without the app ✓ ◐ ✓ — —
Story bible derived from the manuscript ✓ — ◐ ◐ —
Works offline, no account required ✓ ✓ ✓ — ◐
One-time purchase, no subscription ✓ ✓ ✓ — ✓
EPUB & print formatting depth ◐ ◐ — — ✓
✓ Yes ◐ Partial — No

Compared July 2026 on the axes serial authors ask about. Scrivener sets session targets from a deadline but does not project a finish date; Novelcrafter's codex and Obsidian's backlinks are maintained by hand rather than read out of the prose.

Pricing

Buy it once. Own it.

Nothing is for sale yet — Leafbind goes on sale when v1 ships, not before. The numbers are published now so you can judge them alongside everything else.

Leafbind licence

$149

one-time

  • The application, owned outright
  • Three years of updates included
  • Keeps working indefinitely, updates or not
  • Windows, macOS, and Linux

Update renewal

$59

optional, every 3 years

  • Extends updates a further three years
  • Skip it and keep your version forever
  • Not a subscription — nothing switches off
  • Works out at about $20 a year

Trial

60 days

no card, no account

  • Every feature, no limits
  • Long on purpose — see below
  • No monthly plan, no free tier
  • No launch discount, ever
“It takes about sixty days before Leafbind can tell you whether you'll hit your deadline.”
Which is exactly why the trial is sixty days and not fourteen. On day one the heatmap is empty and the projection is noise; the forecast only becomes true about you specifically once it has watched you write for a couple of months. A two-week trial would show you an editor — and an editor is not what this is.

What it replaces

$208
Six years of Leafbind

One $149 licence plus a single $59 renewal.

vs
$1,317
Six years of the stack it replaces

Scrivener $60 and Atticus $147 up front, then Plottr at $60/yr and Campfire at $125/yr, indefinitely.

Three years in it is $149 against $762 — and not one of those four tools posts a chapter to Royal Road.

Why we don't sell “lifetime updates”

Because a small startup can't honour it. Platforms shut down — Kindle Vella closed in 2025, Wattpad ended its developer programme without announcing it, Patreon retires per-creation billing in November 2026 — and a buyer who paid once in 2026 would reasonably expect all of it absorbed free in 2032. We'd rather bound the promise than break it. Three years of updates is a promise we can keep, and the application you bought never stops working either way.

If a licence ever lapses, your manuscripts are still a folder of plain files on your own disk. Nothing is held hostage.

On discounts

$149 is the launch price and the lowest it will be. It is set to rise toward $199, not to fall — so there is no sale to wait for, and no inflated list price to see through.

Frequently asked questions

I write novels, not serials. Is this for me?
Yes, and there is no mode to pick. Behaviour follows the genre you tag a book with and whether that book has a release schedule. Set a schedule and you get buffer tracking; leave it off and you get a finish-date projection instead. Most serial authors are novelists twice a year anyway — same manuscript, same app.
Do I need an AI subscription?
No. Nothing in Leafbind calls a model unless you deliberately turn it on with your own API key, and nothing leaves your machine by default. Drafting, tracking, structure, and publishing all work with AI entirely absent — that is the intended configuration, not a degraded one.
What does it cost?
$149, once. That includes three years of updates, and the application keeps working indefinitely whether or not you ever pay again. After three years an optional $59 renewal extends updates for another three. There is no monthly plan and no free tier — there is a 60-day trial with every feature switched on and no card required. Nothing goes on sale until v1 ships.
What happens when my three years of updates run out?
Nothing. The version you have keeps working, offline, for as long as your computer does, and your manuscripts are plain files on your own disk either way. Renewing buys the next three years of new work; it is not how you keep access to what you already bought. We deliberately don't sell “lifetime updates” — that is a promise a small startup cannot honour a decade out, and breaking it later would be worse than bounding it now.
Will there be a launch discount?
No, and there won't be a sale later either. $149 is the launch price and the lowest Leafbind will be; the plan is to raise it toward $199 as the product fills out. Discounting off an inflated list price is common in this category and the authors we're building for see straight through it. If the price ever moves, it moves up, and we'll say so in advance.
Which platforms can I publish to?
Where a real API exists — Ghost, WordPress — Leafbind uploads. For Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital it builds the export pack. For Royal Road, Patreon, Scribble Hub and the rest it formats the chapter for that destination and hands it to you to paste, because none of them offer authors an upload API and some forbid automation outright. The part that actually saves your week is not the click: it is Leafbind knowing which chapters have gone where, and what changed since.
What format are my manuscripts stored in?
Plain Markdown with a YAML header, one file per scene, in a normal folder on your disk. You can open the whole book in any editor, put it in Git, and search it with the tools you already have. There is no bundle and no database.
Can I write in a language other than English?
Yes, and this is a first-class case rather than an afterthought. Quote styles („…“, « … »), spell-check dictionaries, and word-count rules follow the language of the manuscript, per book, cascading down from your universe. The app's own menus are English for now.
Can I bring my Scrivener project over?
Import from Scrivener and other RTF-based tools is a core part of the roadmap. Years of existing manuscript should not have to be retyped to move.
Is Leafbind available yet?
Not yet. It is in active development as a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Rather than a launch-day mailing list, we publish a monthly development update with screenshots of the real thing — sign up below and judge it as it gets built.

Watch it get built

One email a month: what shipped, what broke, and screenshots of the actual app. No drip sequence, no launch hype, one-click unsubscribe.