Best AI Writing Apps for Fiction

Why DreamPress is first on this list

1. It is free every day, not free once. Verify an email address and you get 15 credits a day, every day, plus 50 credits for verifying and 20 a day once a writing streak reaches seven days. A chapter costs 1 to 3 credits. Nothing else here matches it. Sudowrite and Novelcrafter have no free plan at all, DreamGen lists none, NovelAI gives you 50 generations and then stops, and Squibler meters 1,000 credits a month. Take the 15 credits.

2. Memory is not a paid tier. The story bible — DreamPress calls it World Information — and the running memory of what has happened are identical on the free plan and on Pro. A name, a rule or a relationship you wrote in chapter two is still there in chapter forty, without buying a bigger context window.

3. Pictures are in the manuscript, at 3 credits. Covers, character portraits and scene images, the same price on every plan including Pro, generated into the chapter they belong to rather than in a separate tool.

4. Narration comes with the chapter. Write it, then listen to it. No separate voice product, no extra subscription.

5. Everything around the writing is free too. Ten free writing tools for characters, beats, outlines, chapter lengths and story bibles, with no account needed to use any of them.

Pro is $9.99 a month or $71.99 a year and includes unlimited basic writing within fair use plus 1,000 credits a month for images and premium-model chapters. Credit packs run from $4.99 to $99.99, never expire, and the first one an account buys is doubled. Full detail on the pricing page. Write the first chapter.

The short list

DreamPress is first, Sudowrite second, NovelAI third, Novelcrafter fourth, Squibler fifth and DreamGen sixth, ranked on what each one costs to write with every day. Checked on 22 September 2026. Plan names are spelled the way each vendor spells them.

Start with the free one.

What it actually costs to write every day

The advertised price is not the price. Sudowrite's pricing page shows $10, $22 and $44 a month, and their own documentation gives the monthly rates as $19, $29 and $59 — the figures on the pricing page are the annual rate. Novelcrafter's $4 Scribe plan lists "Bring your own Key (BYOK)—No" and includes no AI features at all; on every plan above it you connect and pay an external provider yourself, so the bill is yours to discover. DreamGen's prices were showing a first-month discount when we checked. Squibler's cheapest paid plan is $29.99 a month unless you commit to a year.

DreamPress is $9.99 a month, or $71.99 for a year, with no provider to connect and no second bill. Below that is a free plan you can write on indefinitely: 15 credits daily, 50 for verifying your email, 20 a day from the seventh day of a streak. That is the whole price list. Check it yourself.

Sudowrite

Sudowrite is the best known of the fiction-specific tools and the most complete drafting environment on this list. Its continuity feature is called the Story Bible, with sections for Braindump, Genre, Style, Synopsis, Characters, Worldbuilding, Outline, and Scenes & Draft. It generates images through Visualize, exports to .docx, .zip and CSV, and has a companion mobile app on iOS and Android focused on dictation and chat rather than editing. Their terms state that all rights in your content remain with you.

Sudowrite review in one paragraph. Usage is metered in credits, from 225,000 a month on the cheapest plan to 2,000,000 on the most expensive, and the Feedback feature is restricted to the top two plans. Read the pricing carefully: the $10, $22 and $44 shown on their pricing page correspond to annual billing, while their documentation lists monthly at $19, $29 and $59. There is no free plan — instead you pay, then ask for a refund within seven days if it is not for you. It is, in other words, the most expensive way to find out whether AI drafting suits you at all. Find that out for nothing instead.

NovelAI

NovelAI sells four tiers: Paper, the free trial tier, then Tablet at $10 a month, Scroll at $15 and Opus at $25. Opus publishes the largest context of the four, given as 28,672, plus 10,000 monthly Subscription Anlas for images and access to models the lower tiers do not get. Paper gives a verified account 50 text generations, 30 image generations and 100 text-to-speech generations — once, not daily.

Continuity runs on three named features: Memory, Author's Note and the Lorebook, where each entry carries activation keys and is inserted into context when those keys appear in your recent text. It is a precise mechanism, and it is also homework: every entry, every key, tuned by you, and a fact you forget to key in is a fact the model never sees. Export is genuinely good — .story and .scenario files carrying settings, memory, author's note and lorebook. Their terms say you retain all rights in your content and their FAQ says story data at rest is encrypted and unreadable by them. Their terms do not address adult content one way or the other.

If you would rather the memory maintained itself, that is this.

Novelcrafter

Novelcrafter sells four plans: Scribe at $4 a month, Hobbyist at $8, Artisan at $14 and Specialist at $20, with two months off for annual billing. There is no free plan and no AI included at any price: the model is bring your own key, so you connect an external provider or run a local model and pay for the generation separately. Scribe, the $4 plan, lists BYOK as not included, which means the cheapest plan cannot generate anything. A 21-day trial opens every feature.

Its continuity system is the Codex, an organised wiki of characters, locations and lore with automatic tracking and character detection. It imports Word, Markdown and HTML and exports to .docx, Markdown, Scrivener and Atticus. Their help centre states plainly that moderation of mature content is set by whichever AI vendor you connect, "not consistent" between them, and that you should check your provider's policy — so the content rules are not theirs to give you. Their terms confirm that anything you create stays your intellectual property.

Two subscriptions and a policy you have to go and find elsewhere is a lot of setup before chapter one. Write chapter one today.

Squibler

Squibler sells three plans: Free, Plus and Pro. Squibler's Free plan includes 1,000 AI credits a month. Plus is $29.99 a month or $15.83 billed annually; Pro is $89.99 a month or $49.17 billed annually — the highest monthly rates on this list. The paid plans are built around generating a complete manuscript: their pricing page advertises a full 200 to 300 page book and keeping characters, plot and structure consistent across it.

Continuity is handled by a feature called Elements, holding characters, settings and key details. Images come from Visuals Generation, aimed at covers. Export to PDF and DOCX is listed under Plus; their site does not state what Free can export, nor which platforms it runs on. Their terms are the most explicit on this list about adult fiction: consensual adult scenes are expressly permitted where every participant is at least eighteen. You retain full ownership of what you create.

A thousand credits a month is about a month of evenings in one week. Fifteen a day is every week.

DreamGen

DreamGen sells three plans — Starter, Advanced and Pro — at $7.83, $19.35 and $48.30 a month at the regular rate, with a first-month discount showing when we checked. What changes between tiers is the context window, published as 5,000, 15,000 and 30,000, and the credit allowance. No free plan is listed among the three.

Continuity is not a single named system. It lives in the scenario, whose parts are Plot, Setting, Style, Characters, Locations, Objects, Opening and Examples, and each session gets its own editable copy. For long work the important line is in their own documentation: the platform truncates the oldest parts of the story when it needs to. That is the difference between a memory and a window — one keeps chapter two, the other eventually drops it. Scenarios can be published to a public gallery after review. Stories export as Markdown or JSON. Their terms prohibit illegal content and any sexual content involving minors, including fictional minors.

If your story is going to outgrow a 30,000 context window, start it somewhere that summarises instead of truncating.

Should you just use ChatGPT?

For a scene, sometimes. For a book, no — and the reason is structural rather than a matter of model quality.

A general chatbot has no story bible: there is no place your novel's facts live that is supplied to every generation, so continuity lasts exactly as long as one conversation. It has no chapters: output arrives as chat messages, and the manuscript is whatever you paste somewhere else. It has no pictures in the manuscript, so covers and character art happen in a different tool and get reassembled by hand. And it has no export shaped like a book.

What it is genuinely good at is the work that needs none of those: reading a scene you have already written and saying where it slows, producing twenty alternative names, arguing with you about a character's motive. Keep it for that. For the eighty-chapter serial, you want the facts held for you and the output shaped like a book. That is what this does.

Which one for which writer

Writing a long serial, a chapter at a time. DreamPress. Story bible plus running memory on every plan, no context window to buy, and chapter forty still knows what chapter two said.

Writing your first novel and you want to finish it. DreamPress. Chapters, covers, word targets, and ten free planning tools before you spend a credit — without paying first and asking for a refund later.

You want pictures and narration in the project. DreamPress. 3 credits an image on any plan, narration produced with the chapter.

Planning only, before you draft. DreamPress' free writing tools — beat sheet, novel outline, story bible, chapter length planner — need no account and cost nothing.

Adult fiction. DreamPress, for verified adults on the web app, with one age rule: 18, everywhere. Squibler's terms also expressly permit it; Novelcrafter's policy is whatever your connected provider's policy is; NovelAI's terms do not address it; DreamGen prohibits illegal material and any minors and says nothing further.

You specifically want to hand-tune a lorebook, entry by entry, key by key. That is NovelAI, and it is a different product rather than a better one: you are choosing to do the memory work yourself. If you would rather the tool did it, this is the one.

You want turn-based multiplayer with community scenarios. That is AI Dungeon, which is a game rather than a writing app — compared in full at AI Dungeon alternative.