I wasn’t planning to write any of this down.
I opened Novel AI to settle an argument with myself. Every AI writing tool I’d tried had the same failure mode: ask for something funny and you get something pleasant. Competent. Sanded smooth. I wanted to know whether a model trained on fiction, and very little else, could actually land a joke. So I gave it the pettiest prompt I could think of.
What I got was an hour of notes, because almost everything interesting happened before the writing. The sign-up broke. The workaround taught me something real about where my work lives. A tip in the corner of the editor was recommending a feature the default model doesn’t support.
None of that is in the marketing copy, and most of it isn’t in the reviews either, because reviews start after the account already exists. So here’s the whole thing in order: what I clicked, what broke, what it costs, what came out, and whether I’d pay.
Novel AI Explained.
| What it is | Two products sharing one tab and one bill: a fiction-tuned text model, and an anime-trained image model. |
| Who makes it | Anlatan, a small US studio registered in Delaware. |
| How old | Text beta launched June 2021. Image generation arrived 3 October 2022. |
| Where it runs | Browser only. Installable as a progressive web app. No native mobile app. |
| Free entry | 50 text generations, 30 images up to 1024×1024, 100 text-to-speech clips. Email-verified account required. |
| Paid entry | $10/mo Tablet → $15 Scroll → $25 Opus. No annual discount. Renews every 30 days. |
| Privacy stance | Stories are encrypted in your browser before they reach the server. Anlatan says it cannot read them. |
| The catch | That encryption is keyed to your password. Reset it and your remotely stored stories are gone. |
| Worth knowing who’s already in the room: Similarweb puts novelai.net’s audience at roughly 78% male, skewing 18-24, with Japan the top country for desktop traffic, and about 78% of visits arriving direct. People type the URL. That’s a destination, not a discovery. |
How I tested it
| FIELD | DETAIL |
|---|---|
| Tier | Free trial. No card, no subscription, no gift key |
| Entry route | Email sign-up first, then Google sign-in once that failed |
| Mode | Storyteller, not Text Adventure |
| Prompt | write a funny story on “The Meeting That Should’ve Been an Email” and a funny twist |
| Quality check | QuillBot’s free grammar checker, English (US), no account |
| Not tested | Image generation, text-to-speech, Lorebook at any real scale, any paid tier |
Eight steps from homepage to finished story
The landing page sets the split
Two buttons: Create Anime Art and Create Stories. That split is the honest shape of the product. Novel AI really is two tools behind one subscription, and the homepage doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Read “free” carefully, though. The trial is a fixed allowance, not a free tier, and Anlatan has said there are no plans for a permanent free version.
 Novel AI homepage reading Create High Quality AI Anime Art and Stories, with Create Anime Art and Create Stories buttons |
Email sign-up: Error: [M55wNs] reCAPTCHA failed
Sign-up is a modal: email, password, repeat password, and a newsletter toggle that arrives switched on. I filled it in, hit Start Creating!, and got a red line of text and nowhere to go.
This is a Google reCAPTCHA failure, not a Novel AI one. The site is a bystander getting blamed. The usual causes, in rough order of likelihood:
• A stale token. They live about two minutes and are single-use. Linger on the form and it dies quietly.
• An extension. Ad blockers, script blockers and privacy add-ons stop Google’s script from running.
• A VPN or shared IP that Google’s behavioural scoring reads as bot-like.
• Stale cache and cookies breaking token validation.
The fixes are boring and they work: reload, refill fast, whitelist the tab, drop the VPN, try another browser. The modal tells you none of that. It hands you an error code and a wall.
 Novel AI sign-up modal offering 50 free text generation actions, with email and password fields |
 Red error message reading Error M55wNs reCAPTCHA failed beneath the Novel AI sign-up form |
Sign in with Google: through in one click
One consent screen, one button. Google hands over name, profile picture and email address, nothing more. No card, no verification email to chase.
It works because the Google route skips the reCAPTCHA widget entirely. It also changes what happens next, which is where this stopped being a boring sign-up.
 Google consent screen listing the name, profile picture and email address that novelai.net will receive |
“Password Setup Required”: the most important screen in the product
Straight after the Google login, Novel AI stops and asks for a password anyway. Not a login password. An encryption password:
This looks like friction. It’s the product being unusually honest. Per Anlatan’s own engineering writeup, your device derives two things from your credentials: an auth token for the server, and an encryption key that never leaves your machine. Stories are encrypted in the browser before upload. That’s how Anlatan can claim it cannot read them and mean it.
Google can hand over an identity. It cannot hand over a secret only you know. With no password in the flow there’s nothing to derive a key from, so Novel AI asks you to invent one.
The consequence is spelled out in Novel AI’s own FAQ: the most common way people lose their stories is resetting their password on the login screen. A reset destroys the key, and the stories go with it. No back door, by design.
DO THIS ON DAY ONE User Settings → Account → Download All Stories exports everything as a .zip. Then put that encryption password where a password manager can find it. It’s the one step here I’d genuinely nag you about. |
 Novel AI modal titled Password Setup Required explaining that content is encrypted locally and the password cannot be recovered |
The dashboard doesn’t waste your time
A news strip pointing at Explore, a large Start your first Story, an Import File option, and two cards for the other half of the product: Image Generator, and Director Tools (background removal, line art, sketch, colorize, emotion, declutter).
No tour, no checklist, no five-step pop-up sequence. For once, that’s a compliment.
 Novel AI dashboard showing Start your first Story with a New Story card, plus Image Generator and Director Tools cards |
Storyteller or Text Adventure: pick deliberately
The fork that decides what this tool is for you, presented as two equal cards with no guidance. The difference in plain terms:
| STORYTELLER | TEXT ADVENTURE | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The default. Continuous prose. | Quest mode with its own interface. |
| How it reads your input | No distinction between your action and the AI’s reaction. It’s one document. | Separates your commands from the AI’s responses. |
| Pick it to | Write. | Play. |
Beneath it sits a scenario browser of community starting points, tagged by perspective and genre, with a preview before you commit. I picked Storyteller. If you want a co-writer rather than a dungeon master, so should you.
 Novel AI screen headed Let's start writing with Storyteller and Text Adventure options above a scenario browser |
The editor is empty on purpose, but the tips aren’t reliable
Blank page. “Enter your prompt here…” A Send button. The restraint is the design; there’s nothing to learn before you can start.
Along the bottom, though, rotating tips. Mine cycled through Banned Tokens, Stop Sequences and Telepathy. And here’s the snag: Novel AI’s own documentation states that Banned Tokens aren’t available on Xialong or GLM-4.6, the current models, including the one the free trial runs on. The editor was recommending a feature the default model doesn’t support.
It’s small. It’s also precisely the sort of thing that costs a new user twenty minutes and a bit of trust.
 Empty Novel AI story editor with the placeholder Enter your prompt here and a Banned Tokens tip along the bottom |
 The prompt write a funny story on The Meeting That Should've Been an Email typed into the Novel AI editor |
The output: it found a structure I didn’t ask for
Conference Room B. Fluorescent lights buzzing “with the determination of a trapped wasp.” Gerald from Marketing counting water stains on the ceiling (eighteen, a new personal record) while assembling a paperclip giraffe. Kevin from HR, “the human embodiment of a footnote.”
Then it did something I hadn’t asked for: it built architecture. The giraffe becomes a running gag and a payoff, its neck too long for its body, collapsing into a heap of metallic shame at the exact moment the meeting does. Susan from IT lands the real joke, the question every corporate comedy is about: what, precisely, are we doing?
A handful of Sends got me there, and that’s the core difference between this and a chatbot. Each press continues rather than answers. It isn’t responding to you. It’s carrying on from you.
 Novel AI generated story text set in Conference Room B, opening the meeting comedy |
 Continuation of the generated story where Susan from IT challenges the meeting |
What a checker says, and what it can’t
“It felt funny” isn’t a finding, so I pasted the whole thing into QuillBot’s free grammar checker. No account, no paywall, English (US). What came back:
| METRIC | SCORE | WHAT IT’S MEASURING |
|---|---|---|
| Grammar | 99 | Spelling, punctuation, sentence structure |
| Fluency | 96 | Whether sentences read naturally |
| Clarity | 74 | How easily a reader extracts the meaning |
| Engagement | 93 | Variety, energy, whether it holds attention |
| Overall | Excellent | QuillBot’s composite of the four, plus delivery |
| Length | 599 | Words, unedited |
Read the 74 carefully. It’s the only number under 90, and it is not the failure it looks like. Clarity scoring rewards short sentences and plain words, but the joke in this story is dense corporate language: synergising core competencies, actualising actionable insights moving forward. A clarity penalty means the model committed to the bit. Strip the 74 away and you’ve deleted the story.
| The lesson applies to every grammar checker you’ll ever point at fiction: these tools score prose against a business-writing ideal. Grammar 99 says the model isn’t producing broken sentences. Clarity 74 says it wrote in character. Neither is a defect. |
What no checker can score is whether it’s funny. It is, in a dry, observational way. Not a punchline machine. A noticing machine.
 The generated story pasted into QuillBot's free grammar checker input box |
 QuillBot writing assistant showing Grammar 99, Fluency 96, Clarity 74, Engagement 93 and an Excellent overall rating for 599 words |
What the free trial actually gives you
| ALLOWANCE | AMOUNT | NOTES |
|---|---|---|
| Text generations | 50 | Verified email required. Every Send spends one. |
| Image generations | 30 | Up to 1024×1024. |
| Text-to-speech | 100 | Anlatan’s own customisable voice models. |
| Settings & features | Full | Presets, samplers, Memory, Author’s Note, Lorebook: all unlocked. |
| Your stories | Kept | Everything made during the trial carries over if you subscribe. |
Two things people consistently get wrong here:
• 50 generations is smaller than it sounds. My 599-word story ate a handful. Once you start retrying outputs (and you will; retry is the entire workflow) you’ll be at zero inside an evening.
• The trial isn’t running a crippled model. Since 15 October 2025, GLM-4.6 has been available on every tier, free trial included. What you’re testing is close to what you’d buy. That’s unusually fair, and it’s rare.
Pricing
| PAPER (TRIAL) | TABLET | SCROLL | OPUS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $10/mo | $15/mo | $25/mo |
| Text generation | 50 total | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Context (memory) | Smallest | Larger | Larger still | 28,672 tokens · ~144,000 characters |
| Monthly Anlas | None | 1,000 | 1,000 | 10,000 |
| Free single images | No | No | No | Yes* |
| Exclusive models | None | None | None | Xialong, Erato, Krake |
| Anlas top-up discount | n/a | 20% | 20% | 20% |
* Opus images are free only when generated one at a time, at normal size or above (to 1024×1024), at 28 steps or fewer, with no base image. Batches always cost Anlas.
The Anlas question nobody answers plainly. Anlas is the image currency. Text and text-to-speech never touch it. Anlatan doesn’t publish a per-image price, but the community estimate for a standard 1024×1024 at 28 steps sits around 13 Anlas: roughly 75 images from a 1,000-Anlas allowance. Generate more than a couple a day and the $10 and $15 tiers run dry, at which point Opus stops looking expensive and starts looking obvious.
One mechanic worth internalising: subscription Anlas refill to your tier’s amount rather than stacking, so spend leftovers before renewal. Purchased Anlas never expire.
| What Scroll actually buys you over Tablet: context size. That’s essentially the whole difference. If you write long, it matters. If you write scenes, it doesn’t, which makes the middle tier a strange place to live. |
The model lineup, honestly labelled
| MODEL | BASE & SIZE | CONTEXT | WHO GETS IT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xialong | Anlatan’s finetune of GLM-4.6 · 355B | 28,672 + 8,192 rollover | Opus only |
| GLM-4.6 | ZhipuAI open-source MoE · 355B, untuned | 28,672 + 8,192 rollover | Every tier, trial included |
| Erato | Llama 3 70B base, retrained on Anlatan’s fiction data | 8,192 | Opus |
| Kayra | In-house · 13B | 8,192 | Paid tiers |
| Clio | In-house · 3B | 8,192 | Paid tiers |
• The rollover window is real, not marketing. Your story grows to around 36,864 tokens, then trims back to 28,672, giving you more usable memory without sluggish generations.
• Xialong retries differently. Anlatan says it wasn’t trained with reinforcement learning, so Retry gives genuinely different outcomes rather than the same answer in a new coat. If you’ve ever rerolled a chatbot and got five paraphrases, you know why that’s the pitch.
• The gap between Paper and Opus is memory and model choice, not raw quality per sentence.
The five features that change your output
| FEATURE | WHAT IT DOES | REACH FOR IT WHEN |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | Text pinned to the top of context, always visible to the model | Facts that must never drift: names, setting, rules |
| Author’s Note | Injected near the end of context, so it lands much harder | Steering tone or the next beat right now |
| Lorebook | Entries that fire only when their keywords appear in the text | Worlds too big to hold in context at once |
| Config Presets | Bundled sampler settings, tuned per model | The AI loops or derails. Switch preset before anything else |
| Writer’s Toolbox | Rewrite, Transform, Expand, Condense, Custom, applied to selected text | Editing what exists rather than generating more |
What the review sites score, and what they’re scoring
Before I wrote any of this up I did the thing you’d do: checked the aggregate scores. They’re high. They’re also close to meaningless, and it took about twenty minutes to work out why.
| PLATFORM | SCORE | SAMPLE | WHAT THAT NUMBER IS REALLY MEASURING |
|---|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.6/5 | 14 reviews | Real, but noisy. Several reviewers praise automatic subtitles, translation and video editing. Novel AI does none of those. NOISY |
| Capterra | 5.0/5 | 1 review | One incentivized review from November 2023. The listing also claims phone support and 24/7 live reps. THIN |
| Trustpilot | 3.4/5 | 1 review | A single rating. Anlatan has never invited customers to leave any. THIN |
| Product Hunt | 5.0/5 | 1 review | One sentence, against a launch dated 5 January 2022. THIN |
| Apple App Store | 4.3/5 | 5k+ installs | A different company’s app. Anlatan ships no native app at all. NOT THE PRODUCT |
| r/NovelAi | No score | 44,000 members | Four years of daily use, roughly 4,000 joining in the past year. REAL SIGNAL |
| Anlatan Discord | No score | 55,700 members | Around 12,000 online at any time. This is where support actually happens. REAL SIGNAL |
Add up the four star-rating platforms and you get 17 reviews in total. The two community rooms hold roughly a hundred thousand people. Every published score for this product rests on a sample smaller than a school class.
| The App Store entry deserves its own warning. Anlatan has never shipped an iOS app. Yet the App Store returns NovelAI | AI Story Generator, published by an unrelated developer, billing $4.99 a week and answering support from a Gmail address. A second listing is an app called Rabi whose description name-drops Novel AI, Dreamily and Storymii as search bait. Install either expecting Anlatan and you have bought a stranger’s product. |
What people actually say, site by site
Ignore the stars and read the text instead. The same two complaints surface everywhere, and they aren’t the ones the scores imply.
G2 4.6 · 14 “a bit steep for hobbyists or casual users” The most repeated criticism, and it’s about price, not quality. The same reviewers rate narrative control and Lorebook consistency highly. Second gripe: the learning curve. Ritesh S., Software Engineer · May 2025 |
CAPTERRA 5.0 · 1 “doesn’t care what you want to write, it will write it” The whole platform rests on this one review. Her complaint is telling: it won’t write a chapter from a single prompt, because it isn’t built to. Lori R., Author · Nov 2023 · incentivized |
PRODUCT HUNT 5.0 · 1 “I like the ability to choose writer’s style” That is the entire review. Nine words, holding up a perfect score that has stood since 2022. Peter Potapov · the only reviewer |
APPLE APP STORE wrong product Reviewers ask why it won’t generate video. The developer politely replies that video isn’t supported. Neither party is discussing Anlatan’s product. The confusion is the review. Impostor listing · 5k+ installs |
R/NOVELAI 44k members Nobody argues about whether it works. Threads are overwhelmingly solution and advice requests: reference images, art-style mixing, the new scripting system. Community analysis flags the dominant tone as struggle, not delight. Four years of posts · ~4k joined last year |
AFFILIATE REVIEWS unreliable “flat and lifeless” One publisher runs two pages on Novel AI reaching opposite verdicts, both routing to paid alternatives. Treat any review ending in a referral link accordingly. Scribe · 2026 · both pages |
Strip out the noise and the consensus is narrow: the prose is good, the price stings, and the interface makes you work. That matches my evening exactly.
The friction log
| WHAT ANNOYED ME | SEVERITY |
|---|---|
| reCAPTCHA failure that hands you a code and no guidance | High. It’s the front door |
| Password reset silently means losing remotely stored stories | High. Warned about, but still the sharpest edge here |
| Editor tips promote Banned Tokens, which current models don’t support | Medium. Sends new users chasing a ghost |
| No per-image Anlas price published anywhere obvious | Medium. You can’t budget what you can’t price |
| Newsletter toggle defaults to on | Low. But it’s still a default working against you |
| No native app; progressive web app only | Low. The PWA is decent |
Who this is actually for
WORTH YOUR EVENING IF
• You write fiction and want a model that continues rather than replies
• You want the tone you set, not the tone a safety layer prefers
• Privacy is load-bearing and no vendor should be able to read your draft
• You want prose and art on one bill
• You like knobs: samplers, presets, phrase bias, token probabilities
SKIP IT IF
• You want an assistant that answers questions and drafts emails
• You expect it to write the book for you; it needs steering
• You only want images, since you pay for both halves either way
• You need a native app, offline access, or a mainstream public API
• You want a permanent free tier. There isn’t one, and there won’t be
Final Draft
Here’s the honest shape of my evening: ten minutes fighting a captcha, five minutes reading a password warning that turned out to be the most important screen on the site, and a few minutes getting 599 words that made me laugh out loud once, at a paperclip giraffe, of all things.
I didn’t expect the giraffe. That’s what I keep coming back to. I asked for a funny story about a bad meeting; I didn’t ask for a recurring metaphor that collapses at the exact moment the meeting does. The model found that on its own, because it has read an enormous amount of fiction and very little else, and structure is what fiction teaches.
So: yes, for the writing. Ten dollars is less than the lunch I’d waste sitting in that meeting, and I’d move to Scroll the moment a story ran long, because context is the only thing that really separates the tiers. For the art, only at Opus, where images stop metering.
Would I recommend it to everyone? No, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who does. It isn’t trying to be a helpful assistant, and if that’s what you want it will feel stubborn. It’s a writing surface with a very good ghostwriter behind it, and it expects you to keep hold of the pen.
If you try it: use Google if the captcha bites, put the encryption password somewhere you cannot lose it, download your stories on day one, pick Storyteller. Then go write something that should have been an email.
