About Conteur

I was halfway through writing my sequel when I hit a wall. I kept digging back through my story notes for small details — what a side character had named his enchanted sword, how a particular magic system actually worked — and one afternoon, it took me twenty minutes just to track down that sword's name.

That was the moment it hit me: I was spending more time organizing my novel than actually writing it. There had to be a better way, and the thought stuck with me long after I got back to the page.

So I started paying attention to everything that kept pulling me away from writing. Looking up a term or a fact. Falling down a research rabbit hole. Running my chapters through separate editing or evaluation tools. Switching between different formatting programs. Uploading a finished manuscript to yet another platform just to get it ebook- and submission-ready. Even something as small as stepping away to change the music I write to.

By the time I finished that novel, I'd put together a full list of everything I wanted from a writing tool — something that would cover all of it, so I'd never have to hop between a dozen tabs again. So I sat down and built it.

The more I used it, the more I loved it. Every few days I'd think, “what if it could also do this?” — and I'd add it. I named the program Conteur, French for “storyteller,” because that's exactly what you are the moment you open it.

Eventually I couldn't imagine writing without it. I thought about the other authors I knew who'd probably feel the same way, so I turned it into a real application — a proper installer, automatic updates, the whole thing — because, true to form, I was still finding new features to add.

Then it occurred to me that there wasn't just a handful of writers who might want this. There were thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe more. And I wanted to share it with all of them.

I built Conteur to run offline on an AI model built directly into your computer, so I made that version free — for everyone, permanently. I just wanted to be useful to the wider writing community.

But I couldn't leave it there. Conteur is great on its own, but I knew some writers would want access to more powerful cloud-based AI, or the ability to research from inside the app itself. Assigning a stronger cloud model to specific tools also made everything noticeably faster. So I built tiers on top of the free plan to make that possible.

The free plan stays free, always. But I'll be honest — it doesn't cover the cost of cloud AI usage, servers, hosting, and everything else that goes into keeping this running for an entire community. So I priced the subscriptions as low as I could while still covering those costs, with a little left over for my own time.

A lot of work has gone into Conteur, and that work hasn't stopped — I'm still maintaining it, and still adding to it.

I hope you enjoy using Conteur as much as I've enjoyed building it. Thank you for being here.