Your Account and Plan
My Account in the top-right menu is where your identity, plan, billing, and AI key settings live.
Identity
Your Email is fixed — it is the address you sign in with. Name is editable, and it is the name collaborators see next to your edits and comments.
Upload picture sets the picture shown beside your name in the top-right menu and on your comments. Any common image format works; Inkwell crops it to a square around its centre of interest. Change picture replaces it and Remove clears it. If you sign in with Google, your Google picture is used until you upload your own.
Plan and usage
The Plan card shows which plan you are on, whether it is Active or Cancelling, and how much of it you have used. Inkdrops are the only thing a plan meters, shown as used / allowed this month. A paid plan does not cap how many projects you keep or how much you store.
Inkdrops are the allowance your plan includes for the AI tools. They refill at the start of every month, and they are spent rather than occupied — a heavier job, like indexing a whole book, uses more of them than a quick citation lookup. Every plan has a monthly ceiling, including beta and trial accounts. The one exception is a free trial you signed up for without a credit card, such as the academic trial: its inkdrops are a single allowance for the whole trial, shown as used / allowed for your trial, and they do not refill. The ? beside the count explains more, and AI Tools covers what spends them and what happens when you run out.
Inkwell's plans run from Free upward through Starter, Standard and Professional. Every paid plan includes the agent. Starter and Standard allow 10 collaborators on each project and Professional allows any number. Each step raises the monthly inkdrop allowance, and from Standard up you can also use your own AI key and connect an AI assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT, Grok or Gemini — which may need a plan with that assistant too; see Connecting an AI assistant. The current prices are on the pricing page.
If you have credit on your account, from a referral or otherwise, the card shows how much comes off your next bill.
From this card you can:
Upgrade Plan — move to a plan with a larger inkdrop allowance.
Buy Inkdrops — on a paid plan, buy a pack of extra inkdrops. Packs come in 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000, and checkout happens on Stripe's payment page, which returns you to the page you bought from. Bought inkdrops never expire and are only spent once the month's inkdrops are gone; the Usage section shows how many you have left once you have some.
Buying inkdrops Update Payment — change the card on file.
Billing History — open Stripe's billing page, which lists your past invoices and receipts, including inkdrop packs, with a PDF of each to download. Plan changes and cancellation stay on the Plan card.
Cancel Plan — stop the subscription. The plan stays active until the end of the period you have paid for, and the card shows a Cancelling badge until then.
Renew Plan — appears once you have cancelled, and undoes the cancellation.
Projects of your own need a paid plan. On the free plan you cannot create one, and any you already own stay readable and exportable but not editable — Inkwell shows a banner on those projects with a shortcut to change your plan.
A project someone else has shared with you is not affected by your plan. Your role on it is what decides what you can do there, so you can edit someone's manuscript on the free plan if they have invited you as an editor.
Free trials
Some sign-up pages, such as the free trial and the academic trial, start you on a month of Inkwell with no credit card. Sign in from that page, with Google or with your email address, and the trial starts as your account is created. A welcome email confirms it.
During the trial the Plan card shows the trial's name and the date it expires. You can create projects, use the agent, and use your own AI key or connect an AI assistant, as on Standard. The trial includes 2,000 inkdrops for the whole month, not 2,000 a month. When it expires you move to the free plan, and you can choose a plan from this page to carry on.
Each account gets one free trial. Signing in from a trial page with an account that has already had one, or that is on a paid plan, leaves your plan as it is.
Coupons and discounts
Apply Coupon takes a code and applies it to your subscription. Educational addresses also get 50% off the Starter plan — see the pricing page for how to claim it. The discount does not apply to Standard or Professional.
Referring other writers
Refer a Writer holds your referral link, with a Copy button. Refer a writer: get a month free in the top-right menu brings you straight to it. The link opens Inkwell's home page; share it however you like.
A writer who signs up through your link gets a 30-day free trial of whichever plan they choose, instead of the usual 7 days. When their trial ends and they make their first payment, you get a month of your own plan as credit, and an email saying so. The credit comes off your next bill. If you are on the free plan, it is a month of Starter, and it waits until you subscribe. The credit is never more than the writer you referred actually paid.
Inviting a collaborator counts too: if the person you invite is new to Inkwell, they get the same 30-day trial and you get the same month when they subscribe.
Under your link, the card counts how many writers you referred have subscribed and how many months you have earned. You can earn up to 12 months in any year. After that, referrals still count but earn no more credit.
Using your own AI key
Inkwell's AI features can run on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or xAI. AI Provider Keys lists all four, and each row lets you supply your own key so that AI usage is billed to that account instead of Inkwell's. By default no key is saved and the AI features use Inkwell's key.
Your own key needs the Standard plan or higher. On a plan without it, the card says so and lets you remove a key saved earlier, but not add one; a saved key is kept, unused, and comes back into use if you move to a plan that includes it.
Whichever key you save is the one your AI features use. Save an Anthropic key and features like citation lookup run on Anthropic's models; save a Google Gemini key and they run on Gemini's. If you save more than one, Inkwell prefers them in this order: OpenAI, then Anthropic, then Google Gemini, then xAI. The agent is the exception, and prefers Anthropic.
Not every provider covers every tool. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini cover all of them, the Agent included — which matters, since everything on the AI menu runs through the Agent. xAI covers the Agent too, but has no model cheap enough for the small, high-volume jobs, so citation lookup and equation conversion keep running on Inkwell's key. Cover art is covered by OpenAI alone: with any other key, the art in the cover designer is painted on Inkwell's key. Whatever still runs on Inkwell's key still spends inkdrops.
Each row shows the last four characters of the saved key so you can tell which one is in place. Your key is encrypted and is never shown back to you in full, so replacing a key means pasting the whole new one. Remove deletes it and returns you to Inkwell's key.
Supplying a key changes only who pays for AI usage. That work is billed to your provider account rather than drawn from your inkdrops, so a saved key leaves most of your monthly allowance untouched — and the tools it covers keep working once your inkdrops run out.
Publisher submission links
If you take submissions from other writers, Submit Links lets you create a public link that opens a pre-configured new project on the submitter's account: you choose the kind, name, logo, message, template, tags, and the role the author gets, and can mark a link as single-use. Submissions arrive back in your own projects list.