Frequently asked questions

Your manuscript is encrypted in transit and at rest using 256-bit AES encryption. We operate on infrastructure with SOC 2-aligned controls, and your files are stored in isolated, access-controlled environments. Only your account can read your documents — no PlotLens employee can access your story content unless you explicitly share it for support purposes. We treat your manuscript with the same seriousness you do.

Never. Your writing is your intellectual property and we treat it that way absolutely. PlotLens processes your text to extract entities and validate canon, but that processing is not used to train or fine-tune any AI model — ours or anyone else's. We have no financial incentive to do otherwise: our business model is built on subscription fees, not data. Your manuscripts stay private. Never used for AI training. Delete anytime. This is a core commitment, not a policy that might change.

Yes, at any time and completely. You can delete individual documents, individual projects, or your entire account from your settings page. Deletion is permanent and irreversible — we don't retain soft-deleted copies or backups of your content beyond a short operational window (seven days) to protect against accidental deletion. If you want a copy of your extracted entities before you go, we provide a full data export in standard JSON format.

Accuracy depends heavily on manuscript quality and narrative complexity. For clean, well-formatted prose, PlotLens achieves over 90% recall on major entities (named characters, named locations, significant objects) in our internal benchmarks. Accuracy is lower for ambiguous pronouns, nicknames used inconsistently, or entities that are only implied rather than explicitly named. We always surface confidence scores alongside extracted entities so you know which facts to verify yourself.

It will, occasionally — no system is perfect, and narrative text is genuinely hard for machines to parse. PlotLens is a guide, not a judge: when it flags something, you decide whether it matters. When PlotLens misidentifies an entity or flags a false contradiction, you can dismiss the flag, correct the extracted fact, or mark the entity as a known exception. Corrections are applied immediately and inform future analysis of the same project. We'd rather surface a flag and let you dismiss it than silently miss an inconsistency that costs you a reader.

Yes, fully. The canon editor lets you edit any extracted fact, merge duplicate entities, split entities that were incorrectly combined, and add facts that PlotLens missed entirely. Your corrections take precedence over AI extraction — the canon you establish manually is treated as authoritative. You can also add notes explaining intentional inconsistencies (like an unreliable narrator) so PlotLens doesn't flag them in future validation runs.

No. PlotLens is not a writing environment — it's a layer of Narrative Intelligence that sits alongside wherever you already write. Upload your manuscript directly (we support .docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf, .md, .epub, and .fountain), run extraction, and return to your writing tool. Some integrations allow you to validate content without even leaving your editor. The goal is to interrupt your writing flow as little as possible. See all supported integrations.

Yes. Scrivener users can compile their project to a single .docx or .rtf file and upload it to PlotLens for analysis. We're working on a more native integration that would allow per-chapter uploads and real-time validation as you draft in Scrivener. In the meantime, many writers use a workflow of weekly uploads — compile on Friday, review the continuity report, fix issues over the weekend, repeat. It adds maybe twenty minutes to a weekly workflow and catches problems that would otherwise compound across months.

Yes. Team plans include role-based permissions with three levels: Viewers (can read canon and validation reports but not modify anything), Editors (can correct extracted entities and add canon rules), and Admins (full access including adding and removing team members). You can assign roles per-project, so a junior writer might be an Editor on their own manuscript and a Viewer on the shared series bible. Granular control over who can change the authoritative canon is especially important for large writing rooms and studio production teams. See how PlotLens works for writing rooms.

Team plans are billed per seat, monthly or annually (with a discount for annual). The account owner manages billing and can add or remove seats at any time — charges are prorated to the day. Enterprise plans can be structured with a fixed seat count and a single annual invoice. We don't charge per-document or per-extraction — once you're on a plan, you can upload and analyze as many manuscripts as your plan allows without worrying about per-use fees.

PlotLens is designed for complex narratives. The Pro plan supports up to 2,000 canonical entities per project; Studio plans support unlimited entities. In practice, even the most sprawling fantasy series rarely exceeds a few hundred significant entities — the rest are background characters and minor locations that don't need to be tracked with the same rigor. If you're working with a genuinely massive narrative — a long-running game world, a multi-decade television universe — contact us; we have enterprise configurations designed for that scale.

Yes, and it's one of our most enthusiastic user segments. Game writers and narrative designers face some of the hardest continuity challenges that exist: branching paths, conditional states, multiple possible histories. PlotLens handles linear narrative well out of the box and has branching-narrative support in early access for qualified teams. Learn more about PlotLens for game studios.

Yes. The free plan includes one project, up to 50 canonical entities, and 10 validation runs per month. It's genuinely useful for a short story, a novella, or a proof of concept before committing to a subscription. No credit card required to sign up. If you hit the limits and want to continue, upgrading takes about thirty seconds.

A document is any file you upload to PlotLens for analysis — a chapter, a manuscript, a character notes file, a location description. You can upload the same file multiple times as it evolves; each upload counts separately. On Pro and Studio plans, document limits are generous enough that most writers never think about them. If you're unsure whether your workflow fits within a plan's limits, email us and we'll walk through it with you.

Yes, on Studio and Enterprise plans. If you have an existing OpenAI or Anthropic API contract, you can configure PlotLens to use your own keys for extraction and validation. This is particularly useful for organizations with existing enterprise AI agreements, data residency requirements, or custom rate limits. Bring-your-own-key mode does not change the privacy guarantees — your content is still never used for training regardless of which key is used.