AuthorBooks is a free, local-first Mac app built specifically for self-employed authors. Track income, expenses, projects, subscriptions, and goals — all stored privately on your own Mac.
macOS 12 Monterey or later · No account required · No data leaves your Mac
AuthorBooks brings together the financial tools that matter most to writers who work for themselves — in one clean, distraction-free app.
Log every expense and income entry with categories, business/personal tagging, receipt attachments, and notes. Filter, sort, and search across your full history.
Organize spending by book, series, or project. Subprojects let you break a series into individual titles and see aggregated costs at every level.
Track freelance contracts and hourly work. Log individual work sessions, calculate total earnings per job, and see a running summary of all client work.
Never be surprised by a renewal. Track every recurring cost — software, memberships, services — and see your total committed monthly spend at a glance.
Set financial targets and track progress over time. See whether you're on track based on your deadline and watch your goals move toward completion.
Monthly summaries, category breakdowns, project spending reports, and tax-ready overviews. Export to CSV whenever you need to hand data to an accountant.
AuthorBooks is designed to get out of your way. No account setup, no cloud sync to configure, no recurring payments.
Download the DMG for your Mac (Intel or Apple Silicon), drag AuthorBooks to your Applications folder, and right-click → Open to bypass Gatekeeper on the first launch. That's the only extra step — every launch after that is normal.
A short onboarding wizard collects your name and optionally an OpenRouter API key for AI features. The whole app works without the key — it just unlocks auto-categorization and receipt scanning.
Add your first transaction, create a project for the book you're working on, and link your spending. The dashboard fills in with summaries, charts, and trends as you go.
Everything is stored in a local SQLite database in your Mac's Application Support folder. Nothing is uploaded, synced, or shared. You own your data completely.
Most financial apps send your data to their servers. AuthorBooks works the opposite way — everything lives in a single database file on your Mac. No cloud, no tracking, no vendor lock-in. Back it up however you want.
If you want to save time, AuthorBooks can use AI to categorize expenses and read receipts automatically. It's entirely optional and costs pennies.
Paste a vendor name and AuthorBooks will suggest the right expense category — cover designer, editing software, conference fee — based on the context of your business.
Attach a photo or PDF of a receipt and the app reads the vendor, amount, and date automatically, pre-filling your transaction form so you don't have to type anything.
AI features are powered by OpenRouter using Claude Haiku — one of the most efficient models available. Typical usage costs less than $0.10 per month for an active author.
Create a free account at openrouter.ai, then go to Keys → Create Key. Paste the key into AuthorBooks during setup or any time in Settings.
No key? No problem. Every feature in AuthorBooks — transactions, projects, reports, goals — works perfectly without it. You can always add a key later.
Available for macOS 12 Monterey and later. Choose the right version for your Mac.
First launch on macOS may show a security warning — right-click the app and choose Open,
or run xattr -cr /Applications/AuthorBooks.app in Terminal.
See the install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Prefer to build from source? Clone the repo on GitHub.