General questions

Is Trove free?

No. The app is a one-off lifetime License: £49 standard, £39 founders price for the first six months from launch. A 14-day trial with every feature unlocked starts on first launch. After the trial, files stay visible but the editor goes read-only until you activate.

Two optional subscriptions sit on top, and neither is needed to write. Guild (£4/month) is the encrypted relay that syncs your own devices. Society (£7/month) adds the community surface — Circles and Letters — and includes Guild rather than being bought alongside it. A single device works fully offline on the lifetime License alone.

Where does Trove store my files?

In a single folder on your computer (default: ~/Documents/trove/). Every Manuscript, Codex, and Tome Note is a plain Markdown or TOML file. You can open them with any text editor, sync them with iCloud Drive / Dropbox / git / Syncthing, and you can leave Trove at any time with your full archive intact. See Storage location.

Do I need an internet connection?

Only to activate your License, and to sync if you’ve turned Guild on. After activation, Trove writes, reads, searches, and compiles fully offline for weeks before it needs to re-validate.

Does Trove send my writing anywhere?

Not in plaintext. The desktop app talks to Polar for License validation — that request carries your License Key, not your text. If you turn on Guild sync, edits leave the device as MLS envelopes (RFC 9420) encrypted on-device; the relay never sees plaintext. If sync is off, nothing leaves the machine unless you put it somewhere yourself.

How does Trove compare to Scrivener / Obsidian / Ulysses?

Different shape:

• Scrivener keeps your work in a proprietary .scrivx package. Powerful, mature, hard to leave. Trove’s Manuscript Tree, Folio, and Board cover the same workflows, but every file is plain Markdown.
• Obsidian is a notes graph. Excellent for the Tome use case. Less natural as a Manuscript spine — no chapter ordering, no Scene status, no Sprint timer, no Folio. Trove’s Tome is intentionally close to Obsidian for the notes corner.
• Ulysses is a Markdown-native writing app with a beautiful editor and iCloud-only library. Trove is similar in editor philosophy but local-first (no iCloud lock-in) and adds the manuscript tree / Entities / Board / Compile chain for novelists.

The trade-off Trove makes: less feature-rich than Scrivener on day one, less polished than Ulysses on day one, in exchange for plain-file portability and zero cloud commitment.

Can I sync across my machines?

Yes, via Guild (the paid encrypted relay, £4/month). Every byte is encrypted on-device with MLS (RFC 9420) before it leaves; the relay sees ciphertext only. See Sync and devices.

If you’d rather not pay for Guild, point your Trove root at an iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or git-managed folder. Trove is single-writer per file, so keep one device editing a Scene at a time.

Will there be collaboration?

Writing groups (Circles), shared Excerpts, and Letters are part of Society (£7/month), which includes Guild underneath it. Anything shared is explicitly chosen and end-to-end encrypted (MLS) to the group. Trove never sees your manuscript content.

Can I use Trove on Windows / Linux?

At launch. Trove is currently pre-launch — join the waitlist on trove.ink to be notified when macOS, Windows, and Linux builds become available. See System requirements.

I changed my mind. Can I get a refund?

Yes — Polar handles a 14-day refund window. Email the address from your purchase receipt or use the Polar customer portal.

Where do I report bugs or request features?

Contact support. Bugs, feature requests, and roadmap discussion all go through there.

Is Trove open source?

Not in the strict OSI sense — it’s source-available under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-MIT), so you can read it, audit the crypto, build it yourself, and verify what’s running on your machine. What you can’t do is repackage it as a competing paid product. Two years after each release, that version automatically converts to the MIT licence — so old Trove always ends up fully open, and the current Trove stays the funded one.