Inkbound

Inkbound is a browser-based novel writing app that keeps chapters, character sheets and world-building notes in one project. A Codex panel opens any character or world entry without leaving the chapter. It's a solo project by Québec City developer Gabrielle Dorval. It launched on Product Hunt in September 2026, runs in French and English, and uses AI only to organize notes and clean up dictation, never to write prose.

What You Get#

• Chapter editor: Rich-text chapters with autosave, search and replace across all chapters, and word-goal and streak tracking.
• Characters and world: Character sheets with a relationship map. World entries are sorted by category (places, factions, magic, creatures, history, languages), and all of them open from the editor.
• Timeline: Drag chapters and date markers onto a timeline to check your chronology.
• Style assistant: Highlights repetitions, "-ment" adverbs and weak verbs as you type.
• Grammar check: Runs when you click it, via LanguageTool's API, with a personal dictionary for invented terms.
• AI detection (Premium): Pre-fills character sheets (appearance, role, traits) and world entries from your manuscript.
• Dictation: The free tier uses browser speech recognition. Premium adds AI-corrected dictation with better punctuation.
• Export: PDF, Word (.docx), plain text or email.

Who It's For#

• First-time novelists outgrowing Google Docs: The free tier covers one full project with the Codex, timeline and style tools.
• Subscription-averse and AI-wary writers: You pay once, and the AI doesn't generate prose.
• Francophone writers: The site is written in French first, with a full FR/EN interface toggle.

Pricing: The free tier allows one project with basic dictation and manually built sheets, and it shows Google AdSense ads. Premium is $20 USD once for lifetime access: unlimited projects, AI dictation, AI character and world detection, no ads and future features. The vendor calls $20 a launch price that will rise. The FAQ offers a 10-day no-questions refund, but the Terms of Service (July 2026) say purchases are final.

Strengths#

• One-time price: $20 lifetime is cheap next to subscription-priced rivals.
• Codex in the editor: Sheets open beside the chapter, and AI can fill them from text you've already written.
• AI text skips Inkbound's servers: Requests go straight from your browser to Mistral on your own key. The vendor says it never sees or stores that text, and that Inkbound itself never uses your content to train AI (Mistral's own default is a separate matter; see Limitations).
• Candid about limits: The FAQ openly calls it young, small-community and online-only.

Limitations#

• Premium AI needs your own Mistral API key: The $20 includes no AI usage. You create a free Mistral account and paste in a key, which Inkbound stores encrypted.
• Mistral may train on your text by default: Per Inkbound's FAQ, Mistral trains on requests unless you disable "Anonymous improvement data" at admin.mistral.ai. Even then it keeps them for 30 days.
• Outside services: Basic dictation uses the browser's engine (Google's service on Chrome), and grammar check sends the chapter to LanguageTool.
• No offline mode or mobile app: An Android app is "coming soon". None is on Google Play yet.
• Very young, one-person product: It reports "50+" registered novelists and has no independent reviews yet (16 upvotes and no reviews on Product Hunt). The terms allow the service to be discontinued at any time.
• No collaboration or ebook formatting: It's single-user, with no EPUB or print-interior output.
• Name confusion: It's unrelated to inkbound.design, a Mac app with an AI co-writer.

Alternatives#

Campfire Write has deeper world-building modules, mobile apps and collaboration, sold monthly or as per-module lifetime licenses. NovelCrafter shares the Codex and bring-your-own-key model but is built for AI-assisted drafting.