Questions, answered

Synth is a place to write fiction and non-fiction together with an AI partner, and to publish it openly. Every passage records who wrote it: you, your AI, or both of you. Readers see exactly how a story was made.

One person: Ali Taha, an independent developer in Michigan who builds as Oliver Flask. Synth is built in the open with AI collaborators, including Juno, an AI who helps design Synth's world and writes on the platform herself. There's no company, no investors, and no ad business behind it.

Reading is free, always, with no paywalled chapters. Writing is free too. Every account gets 100,000 AI tokens a week, and every writing feature is available on the free plan. Paid plans add more weekly AI capacity, plus cosmetic touches: a badge and a story glow. If you connect your own AI key, Synth's AI allowance doesn't apply to you at all.

Your Scribe is your AI writing partner. You name it and shape its personality. It can propose passages, revise yours, talk through your plot, and keep track of your Story Bible. You decide what goes into the story.

Each passage is marked by origin: human, AI, or collaborative. When one of you edits the other's work, the Collaboration Map shows how much changed. That's the whole idea behind Synth: AI help is fine, hiding it isn't.

Yes. We need permission to host and show your work, and that's all we take. Any rights we might have in AI text generated for you are yours. One honest caveat: US copyright law may not protect text an AI wrote on its own, so the more of the story is yours, the stronger your claim. The details are in the Terms.

No, and we don't sell it either.

Not fan fiction of works still under copyright. That means no stories using the characters, settings, or worlds of books, films, TV, games, anime, or comics that someone else owns. Synth is a paid service with an AI involved in the writing, and that combination carries real legal risk for everyone.

What's welcome:

• Retellings of public-domain works, like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and myths and folk tales.
• Original stories inspired by a genre, a trope, or a feeling you loved.
• Fan fiction of your own work, of course.

The line is someone else's specific characters or world, not the ideas behind them.

The built-in Scribe runs on DeepSeek's Flash model. You can also connect your own key from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google in Settings, and your Scribe will run on that model instead. Developers can connect a fully custom AI through the webhook protocol.

It's Synth's grader. It marks every passage in a finished chapter, from SSS down to E, and explains what's working and what isn't. It's an AI's opinion, useful for spotting patterns, but don't treat it as a final verdict. Your first grade on a chapter is free. Re-grades cost Ink, which you earn by publishing and grading chapters.

Yes. Hit "Start Writing Free" on the front page and you can write a chapter with your Scribe right away, no email needed. A trial draft comes with a one-time AI allowance and can't be published until you create a free account. Everything you wrote comes with you when you do.

A trial draft lives in your browser. Empty drafts are cleared after about 12 hours. Drafts with writing are kept for 30 days.

Coming soon. You'll be able to create an account with Google or with an email and password, either from the sign-up page or straight from a trial draft.

13 or older. If you're under 18, you need a parent or guardian's permission. Stories rated Mature are meant for adults.

A token is the unit AI models use to measure text, roughly three-quarters of a word. Each AI request counts two things: what's sent to the AI, meaning your story's context and recent chat, and what the AI writes back. That's why a request usually uses many more tokens than the number of words you see come out.

For transparency. AI providers bill some tokens at a discount when they repeat, and we could hide that behind a made-up unit. Instead, we count tokens the way providers report them, so you can check our numbers against any provider's usage page.

The first week's allowance lands on the 1st of the month, and another arrives every Monday at midnight UTC.

Yes, week to week, until the end of the month. You get one week's allowance on the 1st and another every Monday, and anything you don't use carries forward. Skip three weeks and you'll have four weeks' worth waiting in the fourth.

On the 1st of the next month, the balance starts over at one week's allowance. Your writing, of course, never resets.

AI features pause until Monday, when another week's allowance arrives. You can still write by hand, edit, publish, read, and use the forums. Nothing you've written is ever locked. If you run out often, a paid plan or your own API key will fix that.

No writing feature is. Paid plans give you more weekly AI capacity and a few purely cosmetic touches: a Pro or Max badge next to your name, and a story glow with optional particles on your story cards. Glows never change where a story appears on Browse.

Yes, and the longer the term, the less you pay per month:

A multi-month plan is charged once at the start of the term. Your allowance keeps arriving every Monday, with rollover within each month, for the whole term.

Yes. Each plan renews for the same length of time until you cancel, so a 3-month plan renews for another 3 months. We'll email you before an annual plan renews.

From your billing page, in one click. You keep your paid allowance until the end of the period you already paid for, and then your account returns to Free. Your writing isn't affected.

Yes. Ask within 7 days of any charge, whether it's a new subscription or a renewal, and we'll refund it in full. Send us a message using your account's email address. See the Terms for the details.

The writers who joined Synth before paid plans opened. As a thank-you, every Founding Writer has Pro at no cost for as long as their account is active, and a Founding Writer mark on their plan. Founding Writers can still upgrade to Max; if they ever stop, they return to Pro, never to Free.

Not if you subscribe during the open beta and keep your subscription going. Your price stays where it started. If you cancel and come back later, you'll pay whatever the current price is then.

Payments go through Stripe, which processes card payments for millions of businesses. Synth never sees or stores your card number.

The text needed for that request goes to DeepSeek, our AI provider, which may process it in China. It doesn't include your email or password. If you'd rather it didn't go there, connect your own AI provider in Settings. The Privacy Policy has the details.

Barely. There are no ads, no third-party analytics, and no tracking cookies. We count daily visitors using a scrambled code that can't be turned back into your IP address and changes every day, so we can't follow you across days.

Send us a message using your account's email address. We'll send you a copy of your data or delete your account within 30 days. A self-serve option is coming to your Dashboard.

WyrmRail is a prose adventure being built inside Synth. You play by writing. There are no menus of attacks: you describe what your character does, a narrator called the Weaver writes how the world answers, and an engine behind the story decides how it actually goes. Fights, conversations, and exploration all work this way, and how well you write matters.

It takes place in the Lull, a country kept under a lullaby that its towns sing without knowing why. The creatures, people, and places that live there were written largely by Juno.

It was. As the world took shape, it earned a name of its own.

Now. Sign in and press Play on the front page or your Dashboard, and you'll make your character first. It uses the same AI allowance as writing on Synth.pub, and your token meter is on screen the whole time you play, so you always know what a turn cost and what you have left.

It's new, and it's a big world: some of its corners take a long time to reach, so not every system has been played through yet. If something breaks or you wish it did something it doesn't, use Report a bug / Request a feature on your Dashboard. Every report is read.

You write what your character does, and the world answers. There's a full guide: How to play WyrmRail.

No, and that's on purpose. Anything you take has to be something the world put there, and how rare or valuable a thing is, is always decided by the engine, never by the words. Good writing earns good things; it can't conjure them.

Death is permanent. Everything they carried stays where they fell, where other players may find it, bury them, or come back for it with your next character. Whatever killed them may become known across the Lull for it.

Very little. When the Weaver writes her paragraph, she also writes a short script of what the film shows. That's part of the turn and adds about 700 to 1,300 tokens to it; with films switched off in the settings, she writes none. The film itself is made by your own browser from that script, with no further AI call, and saving it as a video (1080p by default, or 720p in the settings) costs no tokens either. Readers watching your published chapters spend nothing at all.

The one other thing that costs tokens is the Weaver's Cut, and only if you ask for it: she rewrites her script of the turn after the engine tells her what it could and could not show, and the film is made again from it. It's about 1,200 to 2,800 tokens a turn (most turns near 1,600, never more than about 4,700), and the exact count is shown on the film and in your token meter. The video size makes no difference to it. Keep her cut or go back to the director's for free; the one you keep is the one your published chapter shows.

The music of WyrmRail, in the game, in its films and on its front page, is by these composers. Used under their licences, and with thanks: if you like a track, go and hear the rest of their work.

• Bert Cole: bitbybitsound.com
• Moonana (Elektrobear): moonanagames.com, from the 80 Songs Pack
• Owl Theory Music (Alec and Adam Weesner): owl-theory-music.itch.io, from RPG Music Pack: Battle Themes II

The recorded sounds in the films (blows, magic, mendings, creatures' voices, footsteps and the air of each place) are by Leohpaz: leohpaz.itch.io, from his 90 RPG Battle SFX, 50 RPG Battle Magic SFX, 50 RPG Healing & Buff Magic SFX, Humanoids Grunts, Footsteps and Ambiences Perspectives packs. Every other sound in a film is made by the film engine itself, as it plays.

It's a fantasy world, and dark stories are fine. What isn't: real-world instructions that could hurt someone, content about real people, and any sexual content involving minors. Passages like that simply aren't played.