Why Galley Is Buy-Once, Not a Subscription
You can't predict how much you'll write in a month, so paying monthly for a tool you use in bursts never made sense to me. Galley is €199 once: every feature, every export format, every future update, unlimited books. There's a 14-day refund with no questions, and if Galley ever shut down you'd get six months' notice, full exports and the source code.
Some months you write every day. Some months the manuscript doesn’t move because life happened. Paying rent on a tool you use in bursts never sat right with me, so Galley doesn’t work that way.
The maths
A subscription writing tool costs something like €10 to €15 a month. That feels small. Now think about how long a book 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 the tool you wrote your book in. Galley is €199 once, and the next book and the one after that cost nothing more. Against a €12 subscription, you’ve broken even in under a year and a half.
What €199 includes
Everything. Every feature, every export format, every future update, unlimited books, chapters and versions. There are no tiers and nothing is metered, so there’s 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 there’s no free tier
A free tier is usually one of two things. Either you’re the product and your data is the payment, or it’s a cut-down version built to nag you into paying. I don’t want either. Galley doesn’t track you for ads, doesn’t sell anything about you, and never trains anything on your prose. The simplest way to promise that is to charge a fair price once. Am I leaving money on the table with that? Most likely.
What happens if you stop, or if I do
- If you change your mind: email within 14 days and you get a full refund, no questions asked.
- Any time: you can export everything, as PDF, EPUB, Word, Markdown, or the whole library as one zip, so your book is never stuck in here. (How to back up a novel properly covers the rest of a backup.)
- If Galley ever shuts down: you get at least six months’ notice, full exports the whole time, and the code is open-sourced. That’s in the Terms.
You pay once, and Galley is yours whether the book takes one year or five. There’s a list of the other tools you can buy outright in book writing software without a subscription, and the rest of the safety net is on your work is safe.
More on galley
- Galley for Self-PublishingWhat self-publishing a novel in Galley involves: a print-ready interior PDF, a valid EPUB, a tuned file per store, and two checks that run before you upload to KDP.
- Galley for Traditional PublishingQuerying agents or working with an editor: standard manuscript format, the submission package, watermarked beta drafts, and getting an editor's Word comments back where they belong.
- Is Your Writing Being Used to Train AI?How to find out what your writing app is allowed to do with your manuscript: the licence grant, the improve-our-services clause, the sub-processor list, and what no hosted tool can honestly promise.