A screenwriting system · made for the screenwriter

Every craft has its tool.
Screenwriting had a formatter.

Telos is the screenwriter’s workstation. You build the world, the characters, the structure and the voice inside the system; the AI writes scenes, treatments, outlines and episodes out of all of it — and you decide what stays.

Feature, series, vertical drama and short, each one held to the rules of its own craft.

Feature film
TV series
Vertical drama
Short film

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$49/month, 750 credits — what the subscription covers. You create the account, confirm your email and subscribe.

The Rarest Thing · scene 12

INT. PORT WAREHOUSE — DUSK

Maria stops in front of the open container. She doesn’t look back.

MARIA

You got here late.

⌘Jhelp · you’re on: Scene

loaded: world · 7 characters · arcs · open setups · compiled authorial voice

Write the next scene≈40 credits

↳ The AI writes with the project loaded. The cost shows before you click.

What was missing

AI already writes. It doesn’t hold, and it doesn’t let you see.

Generative language models arrived inside the room where stories get made. They write scenes, treatments, outlines and dialogue in seconds, in any voice — and sometimes very well: a single scene, in isolation, can come back better than a tired writer would have written it at 2 a.m. Pretending that changes nothing isn’t a position. It’s a delay.

It doesn’t hold.

Scene 4 is beautiful. By scene 20, the character who was terrified of water is swimming, and nobody caught it. Every new conversation, the same context pasted back in. And the voice that comes back is good — but is it yours, or the median voice of the internet, very well executed?

It doesn’t let you see.

Ask whether the draft is working and you get “the second act drags”: a hunch with vocabulary, no scene, no beat, no line. Ask for what you actually have to hand in — the series bible, the one-pager, colored revisions, a ZIP with one file per episode — and you get none of it. That was never its job.

The most important part is still the person behind the story. So the question became a different one: why shouldn’t storytellers get to use this properly? Not to be replaced by it — to tell more stories, to have a process that makes us write better, or just to find the angle we hadn’t seen on the thing that’s been blocking us for three weeks.

What Telos does

In Telos, your project exists.

It doesn’t live in a conversation that vanishes when you close the tab; it lives in a system. Your world, your characters and their arcs, the structure, every setup you planted and haven’t paid off yet, and your authorial voice all enter every generation, automatically — without you pasting anything back in. That’s what holding the story means.

It runs on frontier language models — today, Claude, by Anthropic. The difference is architectural. And it doesn’t replace the most important part, which is the person writing: it complements them.

What goes into every generation

World
the rules, the places, what happened before the first scene
Characters and arcs
who they are, what they want and where they’re headed
Structure
the outline, the sequence or the episode the scene lives in
Open setups
what the story promised and hasn’t paid off yet
Authorial voice
compiled from what you’ve actually written
What the format asks for
the season’s canon in a series, the length target in vertical drama

Four formats

Format isn’t a filter. It’s a different craft.

A series is not a feature with a different label, and a tool that treats it that way is lying to you. In Telos, each format runs its own engine: other phases, other diagnostics, other deliverables.

Eleven phases, from discovery to the compiled script

Feature film

The whole structure in view, and the line from your script that proves each finding.

The six questions a script doctor charges real money to answer, each returned with the scene and the line that prove it
Semantic payoff checking: the AI reads the setup scene and the payoff scene and tells you whether the payoff actually pays
An emotional curve across the film, exposition density, and a detector for dialogue that says out loud what should have stayed underneath
Forecast vs. diagnosis: the shape the film asked for, against the one that emerged
When the draft locks, production revisions in the industry’s own colors — White, Blue, Pink, Yellow, Green, Goldenrod…
One-pager, cast list and day-out-of-days, with no AI cost

The season is the unit

TV series

Switch seasons and everything re-scopes: canon, arc, audience and export.

Continuity Ledger: the season’s canon, which the AI reads before writing any scene
A break-the-season board by acts, with the room reacting to the whole board instead of one card
Pilot Doctor: the pilot read on four axes — establishment, series engine, continuation hook and pilot type — each backed by a quote
Writers Room: a showrunner, masters of the craft and the network note debating your material
A series bible built from the episodes you actually wrote, not the ones you promised you would — and the season as a ZIP, one file per episode
“What if…”: the impact of a canon change, simulated before you write a single line of it

Seasons of 35 to 90 episodes

Vertical drama

A cliffhanger every episode, and the paywall where the revenue needs it.

Retention scored in every episode, and the cadence of the reversals
A hook and cliffhanger bank — reference, not formula
A/B testing of an entire episode, scored by the read
A web novel turned into a season, in batch
Translation saved into the project, across ten languages — Chinese, Japanese and Korean included

And a pipeline of its own, from the studio brief to delivery

One turn, 5 to 40 minutes

Short film

The whole festival pipeline, from concept to submission.

A concept test that asks whether your idea is a short or the first act of a feature in disguise
Feasibility: can you shoot it on the budget you have? The read points out what drives the cost up and how to simplify
A catalog of 19 festivals, with eligibility checking
A premiere-wave strategy, so you don’t burn your own premiere
A submission CRM, with the deadlines in your calendar
A bilingual EPK, with the laurels pulled in automatically

Special attention

Vertical drama got a pipeline of its own.

Telos was born from a vertical drama — and it’s the format with the tightest deadlines: 35 to 90 episodes, a cliffhanger every minute and a half, a paywall that decides the revenue and a studio waiting. So it has a path of its own, from brief to delivery.

The brief becomes a project.
The trope comes from the library, with its category’s market and typical paywall conversion; the paywall episode is suggested by that market’s range; the client and the first delivery date are on record from day one.
Every episode runs the length you decide.
Ninety seconds by default, adjustable episode by episode. Length is measured on the page, with the same ruler as the PDF, and the AI writes to fit your target.
The AI writes in blocks and waits for you to read.
The queue writes the season six episodes at a time and stops at the paywall, at every arc turn and at the end of each block. A rejected episode comes back with the reason, whatever fails to come out returns its credits, and you see the total before you click.
The read measures what can be measured.
Hook, cliffhanger and paywall for every episode, the season’s retention curve and the conversion estimated by market. Where the read can’t reach, it says “not measured”.
One season, many markets.
The whole season translated in one batch, and the web novel the studio sent turned into a season in a single step.
Delivery comes with a deadline, a link and a round of notes.
Every version goes out with a reading link, and the studio comments without creating an account, pinned to the episode. The slate shows what’s due this week and which notes are waiting for an answer — and the deadlines go to your calendar.

The Heiress · season 1

60 episodes · 90 s target · paywall at EP 10

Block 1 ready · 6 of 6

Read it before releasing the next one. The paywall falls in block 2.

Release EP 7–12120 credits

Delivery · Tidewater Studios · EP 1–12due in 3 days2 notes

↳ The queue pauses at every block so you can read. The cost shows before you click.

Vertical slate

This week1 overdue delivery2 due within 7 days1 unanswered note

The HeiressSwitched Sisters
Tidewater Studios · overdue by 2 days
Blood and VowsGangster Wife
North Village Films · due in 3 days
The Last Shift
no deadline · 1 unanswered note

↳ Projects in deadline order — and the deadlines in your calendar.

In every format

What every script gets.

Character agents

Ask a character to push back. They do.

Every character is an agent: it reads everything you write for them and keeps the voice measured in the lines you’ve actually written — separate from the voice you declared, because the two drift apart and the gap between them is information. When you ask, it goes deeper: facts, internal tensions and a reading of its own voice. When a line comes out sounding like you instead of them, ask the character to push back: they come back with the scene rewritten, and with their reason for it.

“The first time that happened I was genuinely annoyed. Because they were right.”
Diego Lopes, screenwriter and creator of Telos

scene 12 · line 47

MARIA

character · active agent

“I wouldn’t say that. This line sounds like you talking, not me. I’d turn my back and walk out without answering.”

confidence0.84

divergencetone

she woulda gesture

Git-style versions

Two endings, and you lose neither.

One branch per hypothesis, and the whole project follows — characters, scenes, episodes. When a path wins, the merge brings back what matters and the AI suggests how to settle what conflicts. Cherry-pick pulls a single scene.

The Rarest Thing · branches

main128 changes

tragic-alternate-ending14 changes

antagonist-reveals-earlierarchived

cherry-pick: scene 23 from v2

maria-decides-midway-act-2active · 2 days ago

↳ A divergence map across branches, and merges with every conflict laid out scene by scene.

Creation Room

The creative conversation to discover world, characters, theme, voice and treatment. When something lands, one click consolidates it into the project.

Authorial voice

Your voice, compiled from what you write, goes into every generation. And the voice read measures whether a scene sounds like you.

Script Doctor

A read of the whole script, with a backlog you apply item by item — and can undo.

Repertoire

Craft reference cards to look up whenever you want. The system doesn’t push them: what it recommends on its own already goes into the generation.

Discovery

It spots the forgotten setup, the character with no arc, the missing episode — and learns from what you dismiss.

Written in English or Portuguese

A project can be born in English: the AI writes, the editor formats and the export comes out in the language of the work, not the interface’s.

Bring what you already have

Final Draft, Fountain, PDF and plain text. Character aliases merge on their own — MARIA, Maria and M. become one.

Help ⌘J

On any screen: what it’s for, what to do there and your project’s next step.

Three rules

Three rules Telos won’t break.

No verdict without the line that proves it.
Every structural finding cites the passage from your screenplay that backs it, so you can disagree on evidence instead of on authority.
Where it can’t measure, it says “not measured”.
That’s the least impressive thing a piece of software can put on a screen, and it’s deliberate. In a category full of invented metrics, refusing to estimate is a position.
The cost of every action shows before you click.
208 priced operations, and no surprise at the end of the month.

In a feature, this is how the six questions a script doctor charges real money to answer come back — each answer with the scene and the line:

Does your protagonist decide, or does it just happen to them?

In scenes 8, 14 and 22 they react. Their last decision was in scene 3.

Does the midpoint invert anything?

Scene 31 is the middle of the film, and their goal hasn’t changed.

Is the central lie ever confronted?

“I don’t need anyone” is said in scene 5 and never called out again.

Is the antagonist strong enough to win?

They appear in 4 scenes. In none of them does the hero lose anything.

Is the theme you declared the theme your ending answers?

You wrote “forgiveness”. What the ending delivers is “righteous revenge”.

Is there a B-story carrying the theme?

The sister’s thread opens in scene 9 and disappears after 17.

On authorship, since someone always asks

The question isn’t “is there AI in this?” It’s how much human work went in on top.

Cannes, the US Copyright Office, the EU AI Act, the WGA, SAG-AFTRA and DGCA-BR are all circling the same question: when is the work yours? The industry’s reflex has been defensive — detectors trying to catch writers out. That’s the wrong question.

So Telos doesn’t certify authorship: it records process. Scene by scene, what the AI generated, what you rewrote, how far your version moved from its version, and what you rejected outright. It all exports as a PDF/A, with a SHA-256 hash chain over every write to the text, stamped daily at independent anchors (RFC 3161 and Bitcoin). When the work went through AI, the exported file is marked, as the EU AI Act requires.

The document states facts and stops there; it doesn’t declare you the author. Whoever judges still judges — a lawyer, a registrar, a festival juror. Telos just hands you the notebook.

Read the authorship manifesto

Creative process record

Scene 12 — “Reunion at the port”

67%

refined by you

→ 47 operations logged
→ 23 of your rewrites · 14 AI suggestions declined

SHA-256optional RFC 3161 timestamp

8c4d3f2a91b7e6…d28f91f2

Download the process record →

Your script is yours

Your screenplay never becomes training data.

It’s the first question every screenwriter asks about an AI tool, and it deserves a verifiable answer — not a marketing promise.

Never becomes training data

Anthropic is bound, by its published commercial terms, not to train its models on content that passes through the API. Not our word for it — their document, and you can read it right now.

Deleted within 30 days, with stated exceptions

Under the published API retention policy, whatever is sent for generation is deleted within 30 days. Anthropic itself states the exceptions: a submission flagged by its automated trust and safety systems may be retained for up to 2 years, and the classification score for up to 7. It is all in our Privacy Policy.

Never sold, never shared

Your text is not sold, licensed out or used to train anything of ours. Export the whole project as JSON whenever you want; deleting your account deletes the data.

Why it exists

Telos came out of an impossible deadline.

Diego Lopes · screenwriter and director

I was asked to write a vertical drama: 37 episodes, two weeks, shooting already scheduled.

That was never a speed problem. It was a coherence problem — a holding problem.

That show exists. It’s called 88 Constelações, and it’s airing in Brazil, online and on broadcast television. It was written inside Telos. That’s how the deadline got met.

Every feature here answers a problem that showed up while writing. Not a product hypothesis.

Before that

Lamento · 2019Feature · 105 min — Brasília, Cairo, Nashville, Kansas. Theatrical run in 2021.
Manual de Sobrevivência da Literatura Brasileira · 2024Series · 10 episodes — TV Brasil. Virtual production.
Punch TV · 2013Series · 13 episodes — Comedy Central Brazil.
Isabela · 2020Short · 20 min — Tirana, Bogoshorts, Macau, Carmel.
Dona Miroca e Seu Cuco Caduco · 2014Animation · 13 min — Finalist, Grande Prêmio Brasileiro do Cinema.

Feature, series, short and vertical: the four formats Telos supports are the four I write — which is why none of them is a feature with a different label. Trained at the Los Angeles Film School.

Built by one working screenwriter, for screenwriters. Independent: no studio, no streamer, no big tech.

The name

τέλος

té·los · ancient Greek

The purpose that lets each thing flourish on its own terms.

Telos is the word Aristotle used for the fourth cause: the thing that makes something fully what it is. The seed carries the tree; a story carries the film it needs to become.

Every screenplay has its telos. Every character who enters, every scene that survives the cut, every word that stays serves a purpose only the author sees whole. AI can deliver words. Only the author delivers telos.

The tool carries the name because it carries the commitment: the work is yours, and everything in here exists to get you there — without taking you out of the middle of it.

Pricing

One subscription, no tiers.

$49 a month, or $490 a year, and the entire system is unlocked. There’s no basic tier holding half the product hostage: every subscriber gets everything, and what varies is how much you generate — credits, not locked features.

Telos PRO

The monthly subscription: all of Telos, with fresh credits every month.

$49/month

or $490/year — two months off

750 credits per month — what's left rolls over for up to 6 months
Access to everything: generation, anchored diagnosis, character agents, audience model, branching and the process record
The cost shows before you confirm — and you pay for what was used, not what was held
Billed in US dollars (USD)

What each thing costs

One feature-film scene≈40 credits
One TV series scene≈24 credits
One full vertical drama episode20 credits
One short-film scene≈24 credits
A voice read of one scene≈4 credits

With “≈”, the action is billed by actual use: you see the estimate before you click, and you pay for what was used, not what was held.

If the month’s 750 run out

1,500 credits$119

5,000 credits$349

15,000 credits$899

Credit packs top up an existing subscription; they’re not a way in. They never expire.

Three steps: create the account, confirm your email with the link that arrives right away, and subscribe. The whole system opens as soon as the subscription is active.

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One subscription · $49/month

We have been telling stories since the fire. This is just the newest tool.

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Sign-up is open. You create the account, confirm your email and subscribe — in that order. Billing only starts when you subscribe, and the whole system opens right then.