Pendraic Desktop

Pendraic Desktop is the same writing engine as the web app, packaged as a native application for Mac and Windows. Your projects, your indexes, and every pipeline run live entirely on your own machine.

Everything is local

The app ships with its own database. When you write, draft with AI, or run a full book pipeline, the work happens on your computer and the results are stored on your disk. There is no cloud dependency for your manuscript and no telemetry. Logs stay on your machine too.

The one thing that leaves your computer is the AI calls themselves, which go directly to the provider you configure, under your own key.

Bring your own AI, or run it locally

  • Your own keys.Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and OpenRouter keys work the same way they do on the web app. Keys are stored encrypted in your operating system's keychain.
  • Local models. Point Pendraic at Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp). The app discovers the models your endpoint serves and they show up in the model picker like any other provider. No API key required, no cost per token.

A note on local models: small models are noticeably weaker at following structured instructions than the frontier ones. Pendraic's retry and salvage machinery carries a lot of that weight, but for full book pipelines we still recommend a frontier model through your own key.

Licensing

  • One-time purchase, $199. No subscription.
  • One license activates up to three devices. You can see and remove your devices at pendraic.com under Account, so a dead laptop never eats a seat permanently.
  • The license checks in about once a week when you're online. If you're offline for a stretch, nothing happens for 45 days. Even past that, your manuscripts, editing, and exports keep working. Only the AI features pause until the license can validate again.

Beta status

Desktop is in beta. Installers are not yet code-signed, so macOS asks you to right-click and choose Open the first time, and Windows SmartScreen wants a “Run anyway”. Signed and notarized installers with auto-update are on the roadmap before general release. Mac builds are Apple Silicon; Windows builds cover both x64 and ARM machines.