Frequently asked questions

Your manuscript is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with 256-bit AES. Tenant isolation is enforced at the database level, so another customer's queries cannot reach your documents. Staff access to production data is limited to named administrators and is audit-logged; manuscript content is not routinely accessed. Our security page sets out every control in detail, including where we fall short today.

Never. Your writing is your intellectual property and we treat it that way absolutely. PlotLens processes your text to extract story elements and check them against your Story Bible, but that processing is not used to train or fine-tune any AI model — ours or anyone else's. We have no financial incentive to do otherwise: our business model is built on subscription fees, not data. Your manuscripts stay private. Never used for AI training. Delete anytime. This is a core commitment, not a policy that might change. Your Story Bible is the set of facts your story has established — what readers call canon.

Yes, at any time and completely. You can delete individual documents, individual projects, or your entire account from your settings page. Deletion is permanent and irreversible — your content is gone from the product immediately, and the disaster-recovery copies behind it expire automatically, the last of them within about 32 days. If you want a copy of your extracted entities before you go, we provide a full data export in standard JSON format.

Accuracy depends heavily on manuscript quality and narrative complexity. Explicitly named characters, locations, and objects in clean prose are the easiest case. Accuracy is lower for ambiguous pronouns, nicknames used inconsistently, or entities that are only implied rather than explicitly named. Extracted entities show a confidence badge when one is available, so you know which facts to verify yourself.

It will, occasionally — no system is perfect, and narrative text is genuinely hard for machines to parse. PlotLens is a guide, not a judge: when it flags something, you decide whether it matters. When PlotLens misidentifies an entity or flags a false contradiction, you can dismiss the flag, correct the extracted fact, or mark the entity as a known exception. Corrections are applied immediately and inform future analysis of the same project. We'd rather surface a flag and let you dismiss it than silently miss an inconsistency that costs you a reader.

Yes, fully. The Story Elements and Story Bible editors let you edit any extracted fact, merge duplicate story elements, split elements that were incorrectly combined, and add facts that PlotLens missed entirely. Your corrections take precedence over AI extraction — the facts you establish manually are treated as authoritative. You can also add notes explaining intentional inconsistencies (like an unreliable narrator) so PlotLens doesn't flag them in future Manuscript Check runs.

No. PlotLens is not a writing environment — it's a layer of Narrative Intelligence that sits alongside wherever you already write. Upload your manuscript directly (we support .docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf, .md, .epub, and .fountain), run extraction, and return to your writing tool. Some integrations allow you to validate content without even leaving your editor. The goal is to interrupt your writing flow as little as possible. See all supported integrations.

Yes. The PlotLens Companion desktop app watches your .scriv project folder and validates on save. It is in beta — the installers are public and signed, and Companion access is included from Plus up. If you would rather not run it, the export route still works: compile to a single .docx or .rtf and upload it, which takes about twenty minutes a week.

Yes, on projects a team owns. Every team member holds one of four roles: Owner, Admin, Editor, or Viewer. Viewers can open the team's projects but cannot edit or delete entities, relationships, or documents; Editors, Admins, and the Owner can. Admins and the Owner can add and remove members and change their roles. Only the Owner can delete the team, and the Owner's role cannot be changed. Roles are set per team, not per project: a member's role applies to every project that team owns. See how PlotLens works for writing rooms.

Team plans are billed per seat, monthly or annually (with a discount for annual). The account owner manages billing and can add or remove seats at any time — charges are prorated to the day. Enterprise plans can be structured with a fixed seat count and a single annual invoice. We don't charge per-document or per-extraction — once you're on a plan, you can upload and analyze as many manuscripts as your plan allows without worrying about per-use fees.

PlotLens is designed for complex narratives. The Pro plan supports up to 2,000 canonical entities per project; Studio plans support unlimited entities. In practice, even the most sprawling fantasy series rarely exceeds a few hundred significant entities — the rest are background characters and minor locations that don't need to be tracked with the same rigor. If you're working with a genuinely massive narrative — a long-running game world, a multi-decade television universe — contact us; we have enterprise configurations designed for that scale.

Yes, and it's one of our most enthusiastic user segments. Game writers and narrative designers face some of the hardest continuity challenges that exist: branching paths, conditional states, multiple possible histories. PlotLens handles linear narrative well out of the box and has branching-narrative support in early access for qualified teams. Learn more about PlotLens for game studios.

Yes. The free plan includes one project, up to 50 canonical entities, and 25 full-document validations per month. It's genuinely useful for a short story, a novella, or a proof of concept before committing to a subscription. No credit card required to sign up. If you hit the limits and want to continue, upgrading takes about thirty seconds.

A document is any file you upload to PlotLens for analysis — a chapter, a manuscript, a character notes file, a location description. You can upload the same file multiple times as it evolves; each upload counts separately. On Pro and Studio plans, document limits are generous enough that most writers never think about them. If you're unsure whether your workflow fits within a plan's limits, email us and we'll walk through it with you.

Yes, on every paid plan — Plus and above. Store your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key and validation and document processing run on it. Embeddings always run on PlotLens's own models — the vector index is shared. Either way your content is never used for training.