Pendraic Desktop

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.

Moving work between desktop and cloud

If you also keep a Premium cloud plan, Settings, then Cloud Sync, lets you push a copy of any book, series, saga, or world to your pendraic.com account, or pull one down. Every transfer is one you start, and it always lands as a new copy on the other side. Nothing merges, nothing runs on a timer, and before each transfer the app tells you whether the other side already has a copy of that work.

Covers and world maps

Cover and map generation work the same as the cloud, and your license is the only setup. The desktop app builds the prompt locally from your book and world, then the image renders through pendraic.com, so there are no image provider accounts to create and no keys to paste. You get 20 covers and 20 maps a day, resetting at midnight UTC.

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, $99. 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.

Heads up: Windows warns you the first time

The first launch on Windows may show a blue “Windows protected your PC” screen. That is expected for a newly released app, even though it is properly signed and shows twelve52 LLC as the publisher. Click More info, then Run anyway to continue. The warning clears on its own as more people install, so it will not last.

macOS is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no warning. The one Windows download runs on every PC, including ARM (Snapdragon) laptops through built-in emulation, so there is nothing to pick. Updates install themselves on both platforms.