Some months you write every day. Some months the manuscript sits untouched while life happens. Paying rent on a tool you use in bursts never sat right with me, so Galley doesn’t work that way.

The maths nobody does

A subscription writing tool runs you, say, €10 to €15 a month. Feels small. Now be honest about how long a book actually takes. Two years is normal, three isn’t unusual, and plenty of novels take longer.

Three years at €12 a month is €432, and at the end of it you own nothing. Stop paying and you lose access to the tool you wrote your book in. Galley is €199 once, and after that book, the next one, and the one after that cost you nothing more. The break-even against a subscription arrives well before you’ve typed “The End” the first time.

What €199 once includes

Everything. Every feature, every export format, every future update, unlimited books, unlimited chapters, unlimited versions. No tiers, nothing metered, no “upgrade to export EPUB.” I find tiered pricing on a writing tool a bit insulting, because it charges you more to finish the book you’re already paying to write.

Why not a free tier either

Because a free tier is almost always one of two things: you’re the product and your data is the payment, or it’s a deliberately crippled version built to nag you into upgrading. I don’t want either. Galley doesn’t track you, doesn’t sell anything about you, and never trains on your prose, and the cleanest way to promise that is to just charge a fair price once and be done.

What happens if you stop, or if I do

Fair questions both.

  • If you change your mind: 14 days, no questions, full refund.
  • Any time: a full export of your work, so your book is never trapped in here. The commitments behind that are collected on hard to lose, easy to leave.
  • If Galley ever shut down: six months’ notice and an open-source release, so the tool outlives the company.

You pay once, and Galley is yours whether the book takes one year or five. That’s what buying something is supposed to mean.