companies

Novelcrafter

Story-bible-driven novel writing platform that lets authors plug in their own AI provider instead of a single bundled model.

Novelcrafter is a bootstrapped, Hamburg-based writing platform founded in 2023 by German developer and author Leonie Grabel, who built the first version to help herself outline and draft a novel in English, her second language. What started as a solo side project has grown into a small remote team spanning Germany, the UK, and the US, serving well over 100,000 registered authors. The product centers on the Codex, a structured story bible for characters, locations, and lore that automatically tracks mentions across a manuscript, paired with scene-level outlining and chapter planning. Rather than bundling a single AI model, Novelcrafter uses a bring-your-own-key approach, letting writers connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, OpenRouter, or locally hosted Ollama models to its Codex-aware prompts.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Hamburg, Germany

Sector

applications