Now in open beta · built for writers

The writing app that gets out of your way.

Writespace is a fast, quiet workspace for drafts, essays, outlines, and research. It opens instantly, holds your focus, and disappears the moment you start typing. No tabs. No notifications. No bloat.

Start writing free Watch the 90-second tour

Sub-100 ms page loads
Version history on every doc
Import from Notion

Writespace editor with a monospace serif document titled Outline — Book chapter 3

Loved by writers who used to live in

NotionObsidianRoamApple NotesGoogle DocsiA Writer

If you're reading this, you already know

Your writing tool has become the thing you’re writing against.

It takes seven seconds to open.

Seven seconds is long enough for the sentence you had to leave the room. Every time.

Every page has fourteen features.

You wanted a place to draft. You got databases-of-databases, relations, rollups, and a notification for every emoji reaction.

The tool is slower than your brain.

Typing lag. Re-sync spinners. A 'saving…' indicator that sometimes takes five seconds. The sentence was there, and then it wasn't.

It was never built for prose.

It was built for project managers who occasionally wrote. So now every essay you draft lives inside a Kanban board you didn't ask for.

Meet Writespace

One quiet place to draft,
think, and finish.

Writespace is built around a single idea: the more you use it, the quieter it should get. No notification dots. No "getting started" popovers. No AI tray trying to help. Sidebar folds away with one keystroke. Just the page, the cursor, and the next sentence.

Three themes, one keystroke. Warm stone for the night. Sepia for the long afternoon. Cream for the clean morning.

Zen mode

Tap `z`. The rest disappears.

Zen mode is the center of Writespace. Hit z (or ⌘ .) and every piece of UI slides away — sidebar, toolbar, status bar. You're left with the title, your prose, and a soft hint to press esc when you're done.

Editor vertically centers itself for writing posture
Cursor stays on the active line with focus mode
Word & character count quietly in the corner
Works on Mac, iPad, and in any modern browser

The editor

An editor that respects the sentence.

You type. Writespace stays out of the way. No popovers, no autocomplete suggestions, no "try asking AI to finish that paragraph" — the cursor is yours, and the sentence is yours. When you want Markdown, use Markdown. When you want formatting, use the keyboard. When you want to think, close your eyes.

Mono, serif, or sans — switch in one tap
Focus mode dims everything but your active line
Clarity mode (Pro) — highlights hard-to-read sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and weak prose as you write
Book mode for classic justified, indented paragraphs

Bring your own AI

No AI in your drafts — unless you brought it yourself.

Many writers don't want AI anywhere near their work. That's fine. Writespace will never autocomplete a paragraph you didn't ask for, and it will never train a model on what you wrote.

For those of you who do work with AI — we built Writespace with agents in mind from day one. Mint an API token, hand it to your agent, and it'll feel right at home: reading, drafting, filing, tagging, cross-referencing. You stay in charge of what ends up on the page.

Personal API tokens

Mint a token in Account → API. Revoke it in one click. Your agents act on your behalf — no separate service accounts to babysit.

One REST surface, any agent

Every document, database, and tag is addressable over a small, typed HTTP API. Bring Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own in-house model — we don't care which agent you use.

Read your drafts, filter by stale

Agents can ask "what's stale in Essays?" and get a ranked list of drafts, not a wall of JSON. The same staleness signals the dashboard uses are exposed to your agents.

Opt-in, never on by default

If you never mint a token, your Writespace stays AI-free — now and forever. Nothing else to turn off; there is nothing else on.

See agent-ready plans Read the AI policy →

A dashboard for noticing

See the drafts going quiet — without turning writing into a to-do list.

Writespace doesn't just list files. It notices the drafts you haven't touched in a while and surfaces them gently, so the half-finished essay you love doesn't disappear into the backlog. Nothing to assign, nothing to review — just the pieces you started, arranged the way you want to see them.

Stale-draft threshold you set yourself (default 7 days)
Sort by modified, created, title, or status
Group by space, status, or any draft state
Filter by title with fuzzy matching — no query language to learn
Save any view so the dashboard opens exactly how you left it

Writespace dashboard showing a personal set of drafts grouped by space

Rows that open into drafts

A row in the calendar is the draft.

Every record can link to a document. Click a row in the editorial calendar and you're in the actual draft — title, outline, cursor, history. No second source of truth, no pasted-in summaries, no "please keep the Notion page in sync." The row and the writing are the same thing.

One click from any record into the live draft
Property types: text, select, multiSelect, status, number, date, checkbox, URL
Filter, sort, and group by any property
CSV in, Markdown out — never locked in

Version history & export

Yesterday's draft is one click away. So is `.docx`.

Every document quietly snapshots its own history — every meaningful save, every title change, every restructure. Open History, pick a moment, restore. No "I had a better version of this paragraph yesterday" ever again.

When the draft's ready to leave Writespace, you don't need to negotiate with the tool. Two export buttons sit quietly at the top of the editor. Click either one to copy — clean Markdown or rich text, ready to paste straight into Word, Google Docs, Substack, or email. Hold either one to download the file to disk — .md or .docx, formatting and footnotes intact.

Full version history on every document
Restore any earlier version in one click — non-destructive
Click to copy — Markdown or rich text to the clipboard
Hold to download — the file lands as Markdown or .docx
Paste straight into Word, Google Docs, Substack, or email

Version history panel showing a timeline of snapshots for a document

Sources & citations

A real research library — built in, not bolted on.

If you write with footnotes, you know the moment: you've got the sentence, and now you have to stop writing, open a second tool, wrangle a bibliography format, come back, and try to find the thought you had. Writespace keeps a full-fidelity source library inside your workspace — books, journal articles, interviews, podcasts, video, even legal cases — so the citation is one keystroke away from the sentence that needs it.

Paste an ISBN, DOI, or title and Smart Lookup pulls the metadata back for you. Mark each source draft, reviewed, or verified so you always know what's load-bearing and what's still a note to self. Then pick MLA, APA, or Chicago per document — footnotes and bibliography render automatically, in the right style, at the right place.

Full contributor model: authors, editors, translators, interviewers, directors, hosts
16 source types — from book to journal article to legal case to podcast
Smart Lookup: paste an ISBN, DOI, or title and let the metadata fill itself in
Draft / Reviewed / Verified trust states — so half-cited notes never sneak into a published piece
Per-document style: MLA, APA, or Chicago — footnotes and bibliography render automatically
Search across title, authors, container, URL, DOI, ISBN, abstract, and notes

Sources library modal: source list on the left with Draft / Reviewed / Verified badges, Smart Lookup search, and editable metadata for the selected source — Your workspace library — trust-tagged, searchable, and shared across every space.

Insert Citation modal with sources list, mode (Footnote), style (MLA), locator label, locator number, prefix, suffix, and suppress-author option — Insert a citation without leaving the sentence — footnote or inline, with locator and prefix.

Muscle memory in one afternoon

Write without lifting your hands off the keys.

A dozen shortcuts run the whole product — from opening a draft to flipping the theme. Press ? anywhere to see the full map.

n

New document

/

Search everything

z

Zen mode

f

Typewriter mode

t

Cycle theme

h

Home (dashboard)

s

Toggle sidebar

?

All shortcuts

f turns on typewriter mode — the active line stays locked to the vertical center of the screen, so you're always looking at the sentence you're writing, never chasing the cursor down the page.

Shortcuts modal showing keyboard bindings — `?` The full shortcut map, any time.

f Typewriter mode — the cursor never moves, the page does.

Built for the people who actually write

If a sentence matters to you, Writespace was made for you.

Essayists

Draft the hard paragraph. Come back tomorrow. The cursor is exactly where you left it. Every revision is kept in history, so "I had a better version yesterday" is a button, not a lament.

Non-fiction authors

Outline in one space. Research in another. Write, preview, repeat. When chapter 3 changes three times this month, yesterday's version is one click away.

Newsletter writers

Draft the next six issues in one sitting. When it's time to ship, hold the export button and paste clean rich text straight into your mail tool — no re-formatting, no "copy as HTML" dance.

Researchers & grad students

Footnotes, CSL citations, and a sources panel that isn't Zotero. Cite-as-you-write, export to .docx, keep the bibliography inline.

From the beta

Writers stopped switching tabs.
Then they stopped switching tools.

"I moved eight years of notes out of Notion in a weekend. Writespace opens before my coffee finishes brewing. That is not a joke; that is a structural advantage."

— Priya M., newsletter, 18k subscribers

"Zen mode is the first feature I have ever reached for on instinct. Tap z and the computer finally shuts up."

— J. Alvarez, essayist

"We run our book club research in Writespace databases. Four views, zero formulas, no one has asked a question about the tool in three months."

— R. Chen, podcast researcher

"I used to write in Obsidian because it was local. Now I write in Writespace because it respects me. Those are not the same thing."

— Samir K., PhD candidate

Simple, bounded plans

Pay for focus, not seats.

Every plan stays AI-free unless you bring your own. Integrations and agent access only unlock when you mint a token yourself.

Founder pricing — first 200 seats only

Current tier: $39 — 10 of 10 seats left.

Claim a founder seat →

Free

$0/forever

No credit card. No expiration.

The full writing experience. For the person holding the pen.

Unlimited documents and spaces
Mac, iPad, and web — one account
All three themes, zen and focus modes
Markdown and DOCX export
Tags, status tracking, instant search
Offline-ready — works without a connection
No AI, no tracking, no credit card

Start writing free

Most chosen

Pro

$8/month

or $79/year — save $17

Write better, with the tools that turn drafts into finished work.

Everything in Free
Clarity mode — readability checks live
Version history — restore any draft
Databases + linking — sources and projects
Citation Manager — academic CSL citations
Bring-your-own-AI — API tokens for agents
Typed REST API for every document

Try Pro free for 14 days

What changes when you move to Writespace.

Your current tool

Takes five seconds to open. The sentence is already gone.
Buries drafts in a sidebar of 400 pages with no sense of priority.
Loses "the better version from yesterday" — if you can find it at all.
Offers an AI assistant that you didn't ask for and can't fully turn off.
Exports to a format nobody uses, once you've figured out where the button is.
Needs fifteen minutes of set-up before you type your first word.

Writespace

Opens in under a second. Cursor lands in the last paragraph you touched.
Quietly surfaces drafts that have gone stale — so nothing you started disappears into the backlog.
Keeps a full version history on every document — restore a yesterday in one click.
Ships with zero AI in your drafts. If you want an agent, you mint a token on purpose.
One-click export to Markdown or .docx — click to copy, hold to download.
Thirty seconds from sign-up to the first sentence.

FAQ

The honest answers.

Does Writespace work offline?

Not yet. Writespace is cloud-synced today, so a network connection is required. A local-first mode is on the roadmap — it's a big swing and we'd rather ship it honestly than claim it early.

Can I bring my data in?

Databases, yes — you can import CSV, TSV, Notion-exported CSV, and Markdown files straight into a Writespace database with per-column mapping. For individual documents, paste in Markdown and the editor handles the rest. Wholesale "point it at a Notion workspace and get everything back" migration isn't in today; it's on the list.

Why no relations, rollups, or formulas?

Because every database feature beyond those four views is a feature you will spend Saturday maintaining instead of writing. We chose the writer's side of that trade.

Is there an AI assistant built in?

No. Writespace never autocompletes a paragraph, rewrites your prose, or trains on anything you write. If you want AI help, you bring your own — mint an API token and hand it to the agent you already use. That keeps the product neutral and keeps control where it belongs: with you.

Will my writing be used to train a model?

No. We're not an AI company and we're not trying to become one. Your drafts won't be used to train anyone's model — not ours, not a vendor's, not as part of some "we're improving the service" fine print. If you want agents involved in your work, you bring them (see Bring your own AI). Otherwise Writespace never sees your prose as anything but yours.

Native apps?

Yes — a macOS app and iPad app are in active beta. The web app works on Windows, Linux, and any modern browser.

The blank page.
Now a little less heavy.

Free forever for a single writer. No credit card. No onboarding tour. Thirty seconds to your first draft.

Start writing free →

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