We're professional screenwriters who got sick of Final Draft, so we built our own screenwriting app. Now we're looking for beta testers!
[Posted with permission from the mod team]
Hi r/screenwriting,
My name is Tim. Long-time reader, some-time commenter. Also present somewhere in the chat is my writing partner, Lucas.
We're a pair of Aussies who somehow managed to break into the American screenwriting industry from halfway around the world. Long story short: we produced our own pilot for an obscenely low amount of money and an obscenely high amount of effort. We got lucky, and 20th Century Fox bought it. Since then, we've been fortunate enough to work on shows like Spielberg's reboot of Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain. We've developed and sold five original shows and currently have two features in development which we're sadly not allowed to talk about.
HOWEVER, this post isn't about us, it's about the fact that screenwriting software kinda sucks. Especially when you write with someone on the opposite side of the world. Lucas married an American and lives in LA. I spend most of the year in Melbourne, Australia. So our workflow was: write in Final Draft, email the fdx, make revisions, email it back... get angry at your writing partner for removing your perfectly crafted dick joke... write an even more crass dick joke in retaliation... and try not to get confused by the asterisks as your script gets more and more cluttered.
We basically wanted Google Docs for screenwriting, and we couldn't find it, so we decided to build it instead. And the result is...
Sotto. The beta is live at: https://sottowrite.com
The (very) brief sales pitch of what Sotto does --
-- Real-time co-writing, a genuine google-docs-style co-writing experience.
-- Auto-save. Constantly. Like every three seconds. (We were sick of that existential dread you get when the spinning wheel of death pops up in Final Draft and you can't remember the last time you pressed ctrl-S.)
-- Works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook, anywhere you can run an internet browser.
-- Imports and exports across Final Draft, Fountain, plaintext, and PDF.
-- It has all the stuff you'd expect. Industry-standard auto-formatting, find and replace, dual dialogue, a page navigator like what you get in Apple's Preview, a smarter version of autocomplete for character names and locations, keyboard shortcuts for everything, a modern UI that doesn't look like it was designed in 1994, and a dark mode which we think is objectively sexy.
-- And it doesn't have the half-implemented bloat that we never use in apps like Final Draft. Only stuff we actually use as writers ourselves.
Right now, during beta, Sotto is completely free. Long-term, when we move out of beta, we'll continue to offer a free version for up to 25 pages per script. Our unlimited version will cost $0.99/month (and anyone who makes an account during beta will get rewarded with free months when we do eventually flip that switch.) Our goal here is basically to charge enough to cover costs while keeping it as cheap as possible, because we both remember what it was like starting out as cash-strapped creatives (and, with the current state of the industry, we'll probably all be cash-strapped creatives again in the not too distant future).
So, if you're at all interested, we'd love you to join the Sotto beta. If you find a bug, please tell us. If there's a feature you need, please tell us. If you hate it, tell us... but we're fragile, so make sure you sandwich your valid criticisms in praise and compliments about our physical appearance.
TLDR: we built Sotto because we needed it. We're sharing it because we figured other people might need it, too.
Would love to answer any questions about Sotto, about breaking into the industry from the other side of the world, about writing for animation, or about fly fishing (my other great passion in life when I'm not at the keyboard).
Thanks for reading (and hopefully testing Sotto)!
-- Tim and Lucas