Introducing Omni

Quillium has always been a local writing app first. Your drafts live on your machine, your revision history belongs to you, and the core app works without an account, a subscription, or a server quietly sitting between you and your own sentences. That is not changing.

But some parts of writing are not solitary. Sometimes you want an editor in the room. Sometimes you want to work with a co-author without flattening every possibility into one shared draft. Sometimes you want the safety of your local writing environment, but you also want another person to see what you see.

That is what Quillium Omni is for. Now you can finally ask an editor to look at your work.

The public waitlist is open now.

What Omni is

Omni is Quillium’s upcoming sync and real-time collaboration layer.

The basic idea is simple: keep Quillium local-first, but add a paid layer for the things that require servers. Shared documents. Real-time collaboration. Presence. Eventually, sync across your own devices.

The writing app itself stays free. Branching, comments, revisions, suggestions, version history, export, local storage—all of that remains part of Quillium. Omni is for the features that have ongoing infrastructure costs and need to leave your machine because that’s the whole point.

I do not want to charge rent on the act of writing, but I am comfortable charging for servers.

Collaboration for writers, not meetings

Writers do not just edit toward a single line. We try things. We leave alternatives alive. We argue with a sentence by making three versions of it and refusing to choose too early.

Quillium already treats revision as the real work of writing, and Omni is the attempt to make that model collaborative, just without turning Quillium into Google Docs with nicer margins.

Your collaborator should be able to see the same draft, leave comments, suggest revisions, and eventually edit with you in real time. But their UI should not become your UI. Their open modal should not drag you out of your paragraph. Their cursor should be visible without becoming the center of your world.

Collaboration should feel like another mind in the room, not another hand on your mouse.

That is, of course, unless you want it that way. We also implemented a Figma-like follow mode for the times where you need to explain something. Woo design!

What is on the waitlist

The first version of Omni is focused on the foundation: accounts, document sharing, live rooms, and the sync infrastructure that makes collaboration possible.

In the app, you may start seeing Omni surfaces appear behind waitlist gates. That is intentional. We are wiring the product in public before opening the doors fully. It’s also currently free for people who got off the waitlist (and thus is why I have a waitlist in the first place) because I’m trying to gather feedback on the optimal pricing model and account model that can preserve your privacy (and whether people actually care).

After all of this testing, the obvious next pieces are persistent sharing, cloud sync, and a read-only web preview for people who do not have Quillium installed yet.

What stays private

The most important design constraint is still privacy.

Quillium will not upload your documents just because Omni exists. Local writing stays local; I don’t want to incur unnecessary server costs. If you do not turn on sharing or sync, your drafts remain on your machine.

Why a waitlist

I am opening a waitlist because collaboration is one of those features where the shape matters more than the checkbox.

It is (somewhat) easy to build “two cursors in a document.” It is harder to build collaboration that respects the way serious writing actually happens: slowly, asymmetrically, with false starts and private attention and weird little branches that might become the whole piece later.

The waitlist lets me roll this out carefully, learn from the people who actually want it, and avoid pretending the first public version should be the final answer.

If Omni sounds useful to you, join the waitlist.

If not, nothing changes: Quillium remains the same local, free writing app it was yesterday.