Get from sign-up to your first validated chapter in under ten minutes — no manual story bible required.

When to use this

Read this page on day one. It walks you through everything between creating your account and seeing PlotLens cite the line in your draft that contradicts your canon. If you have already created a project and just need help with a specific feature, jump to Upload documents, Entity extraction, or Validation instead.

How it works

PlotLens reads the documents you give it and builds a structured record of your story: characters, locations, events, objects, and the relationships between them. That record is your canon — the source of truth your draft gets checked against. You do not assemble it by hand. You upload your reference material once, and PlotLens extracts the entities for you to review.

Once a canon exists, you can run a validation (also called a story check) on any document in the project. PlotLens reads the new text, compares each claim against your canon, and reports anything that contradicts what it already knows — eye color drift, geography that does not match an earlier chapter, a character in two places at once. Every finding cites the exact sentence in the source document so you can verify it yourself.

The first project you create on a free account is intentionally a small sandbox. It is enough room to upload a manuscript, see the canon get built, run a real validation, and decide whether the results are useful before committing to a paid plan.

PlotLens dashboard with welcome screen for a new account

How to get started

Open the sign-up page and create an account. PlotLens uses Clerk for authentication, so you can sign in with email or one of the social providers Clerk offers.
Once you land on the dashboard, click Create Your First Project. The button sits below the welcome cards.
On the Project Details step, enter a project name (1–100 characters) and an optional description. PlotLens generates a project URL slug for you; edit it if you want a cleaner address.
Pick a template if one applies — Novel, Short Story, Screenplay, or Game. Templates are optional, but they pre-seed sensible document categories.
Continue to the Documents step. Drop your reference material into the upload zone: PDF, DOCX, TXT, EPUB, and RTF are accepted. Upload your established canon first (finished books, series bible notes, world reference) — that text becomes the ground truth.
Continue to the Processing step. PlotLens extracts entities from each document and shows a progress bar per file. Short documents process in under a minute. Novels may take five to ten minutes; you can navigate away and come back.
When processing finishes, open Story Bible in the project sidebar to review the characters, locations, and events PlotLens found. Edit, merge, or delete any entity that needs cleanup.
Open Validation, pick a draft document, and run a story check. Findings appear with a citation pointing to the line in the source document.

Once you have created your first project

The dashboard switches from the welcome screen to a working view as soon as you have a project. A Continue card appears at the top so you can pick up where you left off in your most recent document. An Activation checklist tracks five milestones — create an account, upload a document, explore an entity, run a validation, see a cited source — and ticks them off as you complete them.

A few habits make the rest of the experience smoother:

Upload reference material before drafts. PlotLens cannot flag a contradiction it has never seen. Established canon goes in first; new chapters get checked against it.
Review entities early. The first pass of automatic extraction is rarely perfect. Spend a few minutes merging duplicate characters and fixing obvious misreads before you start running validations.
Re-run validation after edits. Validations run on the document version at the time you click the button. If you fix a flagged line, run the check again to confirm the finding is resolved.

Story bible view with extracted characters and locations

Plan availability

Every new account starts on the Free plan. The free tier is meant for evaluation: enough room to upload a real document, run real story checks, and see cited results, but capped so heavy use prompts an upgrade.

Free plan limits

1 project
5 documents per project
50 auto-extracted entities
10 validations per month
5 custom canon rules
Basic validation only — LLM-powered checks, custom rules, exports beyond the free formats, timeline view, and entity graph all live on paid plans

Paid solo plans

Lite ($5/month) — 3 projects, 20 documents, 200 entities, 50 validations per month, relationship mapping, clean exports
Plus ($15/month) — 10 projects, 100 documents, 1,000 entities, 200 validations per month, timeline view, bulk validation, Google Docs and Word integrations
Pro ($29/month) — unlimited projects, documents, entities, and validations under fair use; canon versioning, BYOK API access, shared projects

Team plans

Small Team ($12/seat/month, up to 5 seats) — shared projects, team dashboard, comment threads, activity log
Studio ($25/seat/month, up to 20 seats) — advanced collaboration, custom roles, BYOK
Production ($45/seat/month, up to 50 seats) — SSO/SAML, audit logs, 99.9% SLA
Enterprise — custom pricing for studios, publishers, and multi-IP workflows

If you joined through a team invite, you inherit your team’s plan instead of starting on Free. See Billing & plans for the full matrix and Teams & collaboration for invite flows.

Limits & edge cases

You hit the project cap. Free accounts are limited to one project. Creating a second one prompts an upgrade. Delete the existing project or upgrade to Lite or higher to add more.
A document fails to upload. Files that exceed your plan’s per-file size limit show “File too large” on the row. Files of unsupported types are rejected at the drop zone before upload starts. Network errors mark the row as “Upload failed” — click Retry Failed to try again without re-selecting the file.
Mixed batch upload. If some files in a batch succeed and others fail, PlotLens shows a toast like “X of Y files failed. You can retry or skip.” The successful uploads are not lost.
Processing seems stuck. You can leave the Processing step at any time. Open the project later and the document list shows current status for each file. There is no need to wait on the wizard screen.
You hit the monthly validation cap. The eleventh validation on a Free plan returns an upgrade prompt. Validations reset at the start of each billing month; upgrading to Lite raises the cap to 50 per month and Plus to 200.
Dashboard shows a rate-limit error. If the projects API returns 429, the dashboard renders an error state with a Retry button. If cached data is available, you will see a “Cached” indicator on stale results.
You joined a team that has no projects yet. The dashboard shows a “Your team is being set up” message until your team lead creates the first project.

Common pitfalls

Uploading drafts before reference material. PlotLens validates new text against the canon it already has. If you upload chapter twelve before any other documents, there is nothing to validate against. Upload the established material first.
Skipping entity review. Automatic extraction is a starting point, not a finished story bible. Two characters with similar names can be merged into one entity, or one character can be split across two. Review the Story Bible before relying on validation results.
Treating findings as errors. Validation reports contradictions, not mistakes. Sometimes the contradiction is intentional — a character lying, a flashback, an unreliable narrator. PlotLens cites its source so you can decide whether to accept, dismiss, or fix each finding.
Editing without re-running. Validation results reflect the document at the moment you ran the check. Save and run again after edits to confirm a finding is resolved.
Expecting team features on Free. Project sharing, team invites, and comment threads start on the Small Team plan. The dashboard hides those controls on solo plans rather than dimming them.