Download Shiro. Nobody Will Ask for Your Email.

Free Means the Whole App

The download has the Board, Write, World, Research and Publish, the authorship record, and the AI if you want it, running on a model on your own computer or on your own API key. There’s no word limit and nothing expires. If you write a 400,000-word fantasy in it, that’s between you and your editor.

Shiro Cloud is the paid part, and the pricing page says what it adds. You can ignore it for as long as the book takes.

Where Your Book Goes

New projects go in a folder called Shiro inside your Documents, unless you pick another place, and Shiro remembers the last place you picked. A project is an ordinary folder you can walk around in:

Documents/Shiro/The Keeper/
  Manuscript/
    01 Arrivals/
      01 The Harbour.md
      02 The Ferry.md
  Notes/
  World/
  Templates/
  Inbox/

A non-fiction project has Research/ where this one has World/. Hidden beside these are .shiro/, which holds snapshots and settings, and .trash/. Scenes are Markdown files with a short header, so any text editor can open them, and if you change one out there, Shiro merges the change when it sees it. Uninstalling the app leaves all of this where it is, because the book was never inside the app. The page on your files has the rest.

Shiro also zips each project when you open it, when you close it, and every few minutes while something is changing. Those copies go to Shiro’s own backup folder on the same computer. Point them at an external drive or a synced folder in You › Backups, since a copy on the same disk goes down with the same disk.

What Happens When You Open It

Very little that you didn’t ask for. The desktop app contacts no Shiro server until you sign in, collects no usage data and sends no crash reports. Its fonts are bundled. A browser test in our build fails if the client makes a request off your computer while you move around the home screen, the lenses and the settings.

Spelling dictionaries and AI models come down only when you click to get them. The local models on offer run from ones that fit in 4 GB of memory up to ones that want 64 GB, and you can write a whole book without installing any.

If there’s a draft somewhere else, import reads Scrivener 3 projects, Novelcrafter exports, Word .docx, Markdown folders and plain text, and leaves the original as it was.

What the Web App Is For

app.meetshiro.com opens cloud projects in a browser, with nothing to install, and you sign in to use it. A cloud project lives on Shiro Cloud rather than in a folder, with a copy kept on each device you use. That suits a book with a co-author, or a week on a computer that isn’t yours.

The web app can’t reach the folders on your disk. To take a local project there, use Move to cloud, which uploads it and leaves your folder behind as a backup. Download as vault goes the other way, saving a Markdown folder and removing the cloud copy. Both are conversions: there’s no two-way sync between a cloud project and a folder.

Or Build It Yourself

The desktop app is open source. If you’d like to read it before you trust it with a novel, the open source page has the commands.

The Questions People Ask

Is Shiro really free?

The desktop app is, with no word limit and no expiry: Board, Write, World, Research, Publish, the authorship record, and AI on a local model or your own key. The paid part is Shiro Cloud, and you never have to touch it.

Do I need an account to use Shiro?

Not on the desktop app. You only sign in for cloud projects and the web app.

Does Shiro work offline?

Yes, on the desktop app, including a local AI model once you’ve downloaded it. Hosted AI, your own API key and cloud sync need a connection, because they talk to something outside your computer.

How do I move my book to another computer?

Copy the project folder across like any other folder, install Shiro there, then choose New, then Open project.