General questions

Is Trove free?

No. Trove is a paid app sold as a one-time lifetime License — no subscription. Standard price £49; Founders price £39 for the first six months from launch. A 14-day trial with full features is included on first launch. After the trial, files stay visible but the editor becomes read-only until you activate.

Where does Trove store my files?

In a single folder on your computer (default: ~/Documents/trove/). Every Project, World, 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. After activation, Trove works fully offline for weeks at a time before it needs to re-validate.

Does Trove send my writing anywhere?

No. Trove is local-first. Your manuscript files never leave your machine unless you put them somewhere (a cloud-sync folder, a backup tool, a git repo). The desktop app only talks to one network endpoint: Polar, for License validation. The validation request sends your License Key — not your writing.

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 binder, Folio, and Corkboard 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 Document 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 binder / Entities / Corkboard / 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.

Will there be sync across machines?

Planned. Pure local-first for v1; cross-device sync is on the roadmap (see issue #16) and will respect the same constraints — no centralised account holding your text. In the meantime, point Trove at a folder synced by iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or git for cross-device continuity.

Will there be collaboration?

Writing groups, shared challenges, and excerpt sharing are designed but not implemented (see issue #16 and #17). The constraint: anything shared is explicitly chosen and end-to-end encrypted. Trove will never see your manuscript content.

Can I use Trove on Windows / Linux?

At launch. The macOS Universal build is shipping today; Windows and Linux builds will land at general launch. See System requirements.

I changed my mind. Can I get a refund?

Yes — Polar handles a 30-day refund window. Email the address from your purchase receipt or use the Polar customer portal.

What’s the project’s source-of-truth issue tracker?

GitHub Issues on the trove repo. Bugs, feature requests, and roadmap discussion all happen there. Issues get labelled (bug, enhancement, chore, etc.) and added to the project board.

Is Trove open source?

The desktop app source is on GitHub. You can read it, build it, fork it. The License Key gates editing (after the trial) on official builds; self-built copies are subject to the same License model. Licensing terms are in LICENSE in the repository root.