Writing a screenplay nobody else can read
Most writing tools ask you to sign up before you may type a word, and the first thing they do with that word is send it somewhere. Plotiva is built the other way round: the editor works with no account at all, and signed out there is no server holding your script because there is no server involved.
What private means here, exactly
Signed out, every keystroke is written to IndexedDB — a database that lives inside your own browser profile, on your own disk. Nothing is posted, nothing is queued to be posted later, and there is no account to attach it to. Close the tab and the script is still there when you come back, because it never went anywhere to need fetching.
That is a structural claim rather than a promise about conduct. A policy saying “we will not read your work” still needs you to trust the people who wrote it. There is nothing to trust here if the writing never leaves the machine in the first place.
Check it yourself, in about twenty seconds
You do not have to take any of this on faith, and it is worth not taking any writing tool on faith. Open the editor, then open your browser’s developer tools and choose the Network tab. Type a few lines of a scene.
Nothing appears. No request goes out while you write, because there is nothing to send. Every other claim on this page is a consequence of that one, and it is the only one you have to verify.
It keeps working with the network off
The same design that keeps the writing private is what lets it work on a plane or a train with no signal. The app shell is cached, the script lives in your browser, and neither needs a connection to open. Turn the wifi off and nothing changes — there is no reconnecting spinner, because there was never a connection carrying your work.
A tool that stops working when the network does was never really running on your machine. This one is.
What changes if you do sign in
Signing in is optional and it is the one thing that sends a screenplay anywhere. It exists for a specific problem: wanting the same draft on a laptop and a phone, and wanting a copy that survives losing the laptop. Choosing it means your scripts are stored in a database row owned by your account, so they can be handed back to your other device.
Those rows are locked to the account that wrote them at the database level, not by application code that could be bypassed — a signed-in reader can only ever fetch their own. The privacy policy says precisely what is kept and when, in plainer terms than this.
If you never sign in, none of that ever happens. The editor is not a trial version of the account; the account is an extra you can decline forever.
Your work is not locked in either
Privacy is not much use if the only copy is somewhere you cannot get it out of. Every script exports to Fountain, a plain-text format that opens in any screenwriting app or any text editor, and to a formatted PDF for sending. Nothing you write here needs this site to remain readable.
Start a script — there is nothing to sign up for.