About
Writing, minus the noise.
Last updated
Most writing tools keep growing — more toolbars, more panels, more things asking for your attention. Minimal Writer goes the other way. It’s a quiet, paper-like canvas built around a single idea: the text comes first.
Everything below is the part that is usually left off an about page: who is actually behind it, where your writing physically sits, how the thing pays for itself, and what it has decided not to become. Those are the questions worth asking before you trust a tool with a draft, and they should not require reading a contract to answer.
Just enough interface
Writing modes — Document, Paragraph, Sentence and Markdown — let you dial in how much of the page stays lit around the caret. The Structure panel lets you restructure long pieces by dragging sections around. Autosave runs quietly in the background. That’s about it, and that’s the point.
A warm background, a calm serif, and generous space. Dark mode and fullscreen for late nights. It runs in any current browser and installs from the address bar if you would rather it had its own window. Everything in service of one thing: getting the words down.
Offline-first, always yours
Every sentence is written to your own device before it goes anywhere else, and sync follows second. The app keeps working when the network doesn’t — a flight, a tunnel or a dead router changes nothing about writing — and if the same document changed in two places while you were away, both versions are kept rather than one quietly overwriting the other.
Markdown export is never locked. Not on a plan that ended, not on an account you are about to delete. Getting your own words out is a promise rather than a feature, and a writing tool that holds your drafts hostage has stopped being a writing tool.
Who makes it
Minimal Writer is built by Granularitylabs, a Norwegian company registered in Ålesund. It is a small operation — small enough that support@minimalwriter.app reaches a person rather than a queue, and usually the person who built the thing you are asking about. The terms name the company in full, with its organisation number.
Being small is the reason for most of the decisions on this page. There is no growth target that a feature has to be shipped to hit, and nobody to answer to who would rather the product collected more than it needs.
How it is paid for
Subscriptions, and nothing else. There is no free tier subsidised by something you cannot see, no advertising, and no arrangement in which your writing is the product. Every account starts with 60 days of full Pro with no card asked for, which means the trial cannot turn into a charge you forgot about.
Payment is handled by Paddle as Merchant of Record: they sell the subscription, take the money, issue the invoice and handle the sales tax. Your card details go to Paddle and never reach us. Cancelling takes a couple of clicks in the app and stops the next renewal immediately — nobody has to be emailed and nothing has to be argued about.
What happens to your writing
Your documents live on your device and, while you are signed in, in our database in the EU (Ireland). They are not end-to-end encrypted, because they have to reach your other machines — so rather than claim we cannot read them, the honest version is that we do not. Nobody here reads your writing, it is never sold, and it never reaches an advertiser. A journal is the exception in your favour: lock one and it is encrypted in your browser before it leaves, which means we genuinely cannot open it.
The app sets no advertising or analytics cookies. Anonymous counts of things like “an export happened” are all that is measured there, with no account attached, and even those can be switched off inside the app. This website asks one question: we advertise on Google, and if you allow it, Google sets a cookie so we can tell whether an ad brought you here. Say no and Google’s script never loads. The privacy policy lists everything we hold and why.
What it will not become
Nothing here writes for you, rewrites you, or suggests what comes next, and no text written in the app is used to train a model — ours or anyone else’s. That is a decision rather than a gap in a roadmap.
It is also not a place for a document to be reviewed. There is no sharing, no comment threads and no second cursor; sync is between your own devices. Sharing a draft means exporting it, and that is the intended ending rather than a missing feature. A tool that stays this size has to be clear about which side of the line each thing falls on.