Questions

What is a passage, a layer, and a check?

Five words this site uses to sell you something, so here they are before the price, not after it.

Passage

One piece of writing at one point in the book. The thing you submit.

Layer

How deep a passage sits. Layer 1 is the whole book in a sentence; each layer down is narrower.

Seed

A sentence you have chosen to expand. Every passage below layer 1 grows out of one.

Check

One passage submitted and judged against the passage above it. The only thing here that costs us money to run, and so the only thing with a number attached.

Branch

A seed and everything written beneath it.

Does the AI write any of my book?

No, and it can't. There's an automated reader in StoryStretch, and its whole job is to state the task, judge whether you met it, and move you on. It has no way to:

• Write a sentence of your book
• Suggest a plot, a character, a phrase, or a fix
• Rewrite, tighten, or improve anything you wrote
• Tell you what it thinks of the work

It answers in a fixed shape: pass or fail, one unmet criterion, one short sentence, and a quotation of your own words showing what the verdict is about. There's no channel through which prose could reach you, so this isn't a promise about how it behaves. It's a limit on what it can send at all.

Where does my writing go?

Your manuscripts are stored in Germany and backed up to encrypted storage in the Netherlands. They aren't published, they aren't shared, and they're never used to train anything.

When you press Submit, that passage and the one above it are sent to Anthropic's API so the reader can check them. Anthropic doesn't train its models on API inputs or outputs. That's the only time your prose leaves our servers. Drafting, autosaving, reading and exporting send nothing anywhere. The Privacy Policy sets it out in full.

Who owns what I write?

You do, entirely. We claim no ownership of your manuscripts and acquire no rights in them. The only licence you grant is the narrow one needed to run the service for you: storing your work, showing it back to you, putting it in the files you ask us to make. It ends when you delete the content or the account.

What is the difference between Submit, Submit & finish, Accept without checking, and Declare finished?

They read alike and they aren't the same, so the app says which is which the whole time.

How far down do the layers go?

As far as the book needs. Odd layers pick pieces out of a paragraph; even layers expand each of those into a paragraph of its own. There's no floor. A short story might stop at layer four. A novel might not.

Layer 3 is the one odd layer where a piece is a single sentence: the paragraph above it is short, so a sentence is the natural unit to pull from it. Every odd layer past that takes pieces of any length. Separate them with a blank line the same way, but write as many sentences into one as it needs.

This matters early, because it changes how much you put into the top: the book is whatever you wrote deepest on each branch. Break a paragraph into pieces and expand those, and the pieces and the paragraph above them become the outline that got you there. They stay, you can read and edit them, and they don't appear in the export. The early layers are architecture. Keep them terse.

You are not locked into the set you first picked, either. Add a piece before or after any of the others at any time, or remove one on its own. Nothing forces you to redo the whole split just to open up one more thread, or to close one you started and changed your mind about.

Each layer has a minimum and no maximum. The minimum rises a little as you go deeper, so a passage two layers under a sentence has to say more than a restatement of it. It levels off after a few layers and stays there. Above the minimum, write as much as the passage wants. Nothing here penalizes length.

One more thing: the layer under a passage takes pieces out of it, so a passage close to the size of the pieces it feeds carries almost all of itself forward, while one far above that leaves most of itself behind as outline. That's a reason to keep the early layers tight, not a rule we enforce. Where a passage should stop is a judgement about your book, and this tool doesn't make that call.

Can I get my book out?

Any time, as a Word .docx. The export is the deepest finished prose in every branch, which is the book as it currently reads, with your name on the title page.

Export keeps working if your subscription lapses or you cancel. Writing stops. Reading and exporting your own manuscripts never do.

What happens during the free trial?

14 days of the whole thing, no card, including 50 AI checks. It is a sample rather than a month's writing: enough to build a few layers and find out whether the method suits you, not enough to draft a book on.

Nothing is charged unless you decide to subscribe. The trial ends on its own instead of turning into a bill.

What if I cancel?

Cancel any time. It takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for. After that you keep reading and exporting everything you wrote, for good. You don't lose access to your own writing over a subscription.

Changed your mind inside 14 days of a charge? Email support@storystretch.com and we'll refund it, no reason needed. See the Refund Policy.

What does it cost?

$9.99 a month, or $99.90 a year, which is 2 months free: $99.90 against the $119.88 twelve months would otherwise cost. Either way it is as many books as you want to write. No word limits, no per-project pricing, no upsell.

A month includes 1,500 AI checks. Steady writing runs somewhere between 100 and 300, well under the cap, and nothing about drafting, reading or exporting touches it.

The allowance is the same on both plans and resets on the first of each calendar month. Paying yearly buys twelve months of 1,500 checks a month, not 1,500 for the whole year. It changes when you are charged, and nothing else.

How do I delete everything?

Deleting a project deletes it and everything in it. To remove the account entirely, email support@storystretch.com and we'll do it. Manuscripts go within 60 days. Billing records are kept only as long as tax law requires.

Something else?

Write to support@storystretch.com. The Terms, Privacy Policy and Refund Policy are the full versions of several of the answers above.