Sudowrite Pricing: Every Plan, Plus What a Novel Costs

Sudowrite costs $10, $22 or $44 a month on yearly billing ($120, $264 or $528 a year), or $19, $29 or $59 monthly, for its Hobby & Student, Professional and Max plans. AI is included through monthly credits, so there's no separate AI bill. There's a free trial but no free plan, and only Max rolls unused credits over.

Sudowrite pricing is easy to read off its pricing page. The harder question is what a book actually costs you, because you pay for every month you keep the plan, and a novel rarely takes one month. This guide gives you both. Every Sudowrite figure below comes from its own pricing page and help docs, read on 28 October 2026, and the novel costs are our arithmetic from those prices, with every assumption shown. We make NovelCanon, which runs AI on your own key instead of credits, so we'll compare the two at the end.

Key takeaways

• Three plans: Hobby & Student, Professional and Max, at $19, $29 and $59 a month, or $10, $22 and $44 a month when you pay for the year.
• AI is included through credits. How many credits an action uses depends on the model, and in Sudowrite's own example one model used over 100 times more than another for the same 200 words.
• A novel costs the months you keep the plan. On Professional, three months billed monthly come to $87; a year comes to $264 billed yearly or $348 billed monthly.
• Yearly billing only pays off if you'll stay. It beats monthly from the 7th month on Hobby & Student, the 9th on Max and the 10th on Professional.
• NovelCanon, which we make, has a free plan and runs AI on your own key at cost. Pro is $15 a month ($12 billed yearly) plus model fees, which come to about $3 for an AI-written draft on a mid-priced model, on our assumptions.

How much does Sudowrite cost?

Sudowrite costs $10 to $44 a month billed yearly, or $19 to $59 billed monthly, across three plans. Here they are side by side.

Plan	Billed monthly	Billed yearly, per month	Billed yearly, per year	Sudowrite describes it as for
Hobby & Student	$19	$10	$120	People who write for fun or for school
Professional	$29	$22	$264	Longer works, like a novel or screenplay
Max	$59	$44	$528	Authors who publish several times a year

Source: Sudowrite's pricing page and its help article on available plans, 28 October 2026. The yearly totals are the per-month price times twelve. Check the page for current terms.

The pricing page advertises "up to 50% off" for yearly billing. That top figure applies to Hobby & Student, where $10 against $19 is a 47% saving. On Professional and Max the yearly discount is about 25%.

What does each Sudowrite plan include?

All three plans get the same core tools; Professional and Max add Sudowrite's feedback tools, Max adds credit rollover, and otherwise the plans differ in the size of their monthly credit allowance.

Every plan lists:

• Write, Rewrite, Describe and Expand, the drafting tools, which read your story context;
• matching your writing style, and continuity across a series;
• chat for brainstorming, research and editing;
• Muse and Ballad, Sudowrite's own fiction models, plus more than 30 models from other providers.

On top of that:

• Professional adds Feedback: developmental edits, line edits and beta reads on your work. Sudowrite's help docs say this is exclusive to Professional and Max.
• Max adds rollover, so unused credits last up to 12 months instead of expiring.

Each plan's monthly credit allowance is listed on the pricing page. We haven't repeated the numbers here because they're the detail most likely to change, so check the allowance on the page before you subscribe.

How do Sudowrite credits work?

Credits are the currency Sudowrite's AI features spend: each plan gets an allowance every month, and each action uses some of it. How much depends on how many words the model reads, how many it writes, and which model does the work. Sudowrite's help docs compare it to arcade tokens and say outright that there's no fixed link between the words you generate and the credits you use.

The model choice matters most. In one example from Sudowrite's help docs, the same request to write 200 words, with the same story context, used about 70 credits on a low-cost model and over 8,000 on a premium one. Small, targeted actions like Rewrite and Describe use few credits; generating a whole chapter from your scene plan uses many.

A few rules decide how far a month's credits go:

• Chat and Quick Edit don't use credits by default. Both have an optional High Quality mode that does.
• Unused credits expire each month on Hobby & Student and Professional. Only Max rolls them over.
• You can buy extra credits if you run out. Bought credits never expire, though you need an active plan to use them.
• You can see what each action cost in the Recent Activity log in the settings.

Is Sudowrite free?

No: Sudowrite has a free trial, then paid plans only. The trial needs no credit card. Its help docs also offer a full refund if you cancel within the first 7 days of a plan.

If you stop paying, your writing stays put. Sudowrite says you can always open and export your documents without a plan. What you lose is the AI: every AI feature needs an active subscription.

What does it cost to write a novel with Sudowrite?

What you pay is the plan price times the number of months you keep it, because the AI is included and there's no usage bill on top. Sudowrite's own cost guide puts an 80,000-word novel at about $10 to $180, and says most writers finish a full draft on Professional within one billing cycle using a mid-priced model.

One cycle covers a draft. But planning, drafting and revising a novel usually spans several months, and the subscription runs for all of them. Here's what the same book costs depending on how long you keep each plan:

Months on the plan	Hobby & Student	Professional	Max
1 month, billed monthly	$19	$29	$59
3 months, billed monthly	$57	$87	$177
6 months, billed monthly	$114	$174	$354
12 months, billed monthly	$228	$348	$708
Any period up to a year, billed yearly	$120	$264	$528

Our arithmetic from Sudowrite's listed prices, 28 October 2026. Bought credits would add to these totals if you run out.

Two things stand out. A fast draft on a monthly plan is the cheapest way to get a book written: three months of Professional cost about a third of a yearly plan. And if your novel takes the best part of a year, yearly billing saves real money, $84 on Professional.

Is yearly or monthly billing cheaper for Sudowrite?

Yearly billing is cheaper only if you would otherwise pay monthly for at least 7 to 10 months, depending on the plan. Before that point, paying monthly costs less in total.

Plan	Yearly price	Monthly price	Yearly wins from
Hobby & Student	$120	$19	Month 7 ($133 billed monthly)
Professional	$264	$29	Month 10 ($290 billed monthly)
Max	$528	$59	Month 9 ($531 billed monthly)

Monthly plans have one more advantage: you can pause them. Sudowrite lets monthly subscribers pause billing and the credit refresh for up to three months, which suits the gap between a first draft and a revision. Yearly plans can't be paused, only cancelled.

How can you keep a Sudowrite bill down?

Pick the model for the job, lean on the features that don't use credits, and only pay for the months you write.

• Use low-cost models for drafts and ideas. Save the premium models for the scenes you care about most, since they can use a hundred times the credits.
• Use chat and Quick Edit freely. They don't spend credits unless you switch on High Quality mode.
• Check Recent Activity after a week. It shows what each action cost, which tells you whether your plan fits.
• Start on a smaller plan and move up if you need to. Upgrading refunds the unused part of your current plan and restarts the billing cycle.
• Pause between drafts if you're on a monthly plan.

How does Sudowrite pricing compare with NovelCanon?

Sudowrite includes the AI in the plan price and meters it with credits; NovelCanon charges for the software and you pay your AI provider directly, at cost. Here are the two side by side, comparing the plans that include full AI use.

	Sudowrite	NovelCanon
Free option	Free trial, plus a 7-day refund	14 days of Pro, then a free plan: 1 project, up to 3 chapters, 20 AI actions a day
Plan with full AI use, billed monthly	Professional, $29 a month	Pro, $15 a month plus model fees
Same plan, billed yearly	$264 a year ($22 a month)	$144 a year ($12 a month) plus model fees
How the AI is paid for	Monthly credits included in the plan	Your own key (BYOK) with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter, billed by the provider at cost, no markup
What you can choose	Sudowrite's fiction models plus 30+ others	Any model your provider offers, including free ones
Unused allowance	Expires monthly, except on Max	No allowance: you pay per request, under a spending cap you set
Consistency	Lists continuity across a series on every plan	As-you-write checks on every plan; on Pro, a contradiction check across the full manuscript, with a cost estimate before it runs

Sudowrite figures from its pricing page and help docs, 28 October 2026. NovelCanon figures from our pricing page.

BYOK, short for "bring your own key", means you create an account with an AI provider, paste its key into NovelCanon and pay that provider for what you use. Providers charge per token, roughly three-quarters of a word, at one rate for what the model reads and a higher rate for what it writes.

So what does the AI side of a novel cost? Take the heaviest case, where the AI drafts all 80,000 words. On our assumptions (about 8,000 tokens in and 900 out per request, roughly 119 requests for the book), the model fees at live OpenRouter prices on 28 October 2026 come to about $0.15 on Claude Haiku 5.5, $2.98 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and $14.88 on Claude Fable 5.1. Triple those if you regenerate everything three times. Our full cost breakdown shows the working and our own logged usage.

Put together, a book drafted over three months costs $87 on Sudowrite Professional billed monthly, and $45 plus about $3 to $9 of mid-priced model fees on NovelCanon Pro. Over a year billed yearly, it's $264 against $144 plus model fees.

Where each comes out ahead: Sudowrite gives you one bill with no key to set up, its own fiction models, and editorial feedback tools on Professional and Max. NovelCanon costs less for the plan with full AI use, has a free plan that never expires, charges you the provider's price with nothing added, and on Pro checks the whole manuscript for contradictions. The trade on our side is a second bill: you manage a key and top up credit with your provider.

For what each tool does with your story, not just what it costs, see our full NovelCanon vs Sudowrite comparison. For the wider field, our guide to Sudowrite alternatives and our roundup of the best AI novel writing software cover the other options.

Is Sudowrite worth the price?

It depends on how much AI you'll use and for how long. Choose by the way you write:

• Hobby & Student if you mostly use chat and Quick Edit, or write short pieces with occasional AI drafting.
• Professional if you plan to draft a novel with a lot of AI help, or want the editorial feedback tools.
• Max if you write several books a year and want unused credits to carry over.
• Monthly billing if your draft will take under seven to ten months, depending on the plan; yearly if you'll write all year.

If you'd rather start free, pay your AI provider at cost, or want a whole-book contradiction check (Pro), compare NovelCanon's plans before you commit. Whichever you choose, use the free trial to see how quickly you spend, then pick the plan and billing period that match.