Built for writers.
Never instead of them
Arqo is nothing without the writer. That is the whole product. A tool can make you faster and meet you in more of the moments you actually write. The moment it tries to replace the person doing the writing, it has misunderstood the work.
There is an army on the other side
Studios and their tech partners are building tools to generate scripts, cut writing staff, and remove screenwriters from development. The pitch is explicit: fewer writers on contract, shorter rooms, AI-generated first drafts that writers polish on a work-for-hire day rate rather than negotiate as series regulars. The WGA went on strike in 2023 partly because of it.
Arqo is not one of those companies. We are on the other side from them.
What Arqo does
Arqo is a screenwriting app. It runs on the web, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The same script is on all of them, edits made offline sync when you reconnect, and standard screenplay formatting is applied as you type. It opens and exports Final Draft (.fdx) and Fountain files, and prints production PDFs with a title page, scene reports, and revision colors in WGA order.
It indexes what you have already written: every character, every location, every thread, and where each was last touched. You can ask it questions about your own script, and it answers from your pages. Beat boards, story arcs, and a mind map are built in for structure work. Every script has version history you can restore from.
We don't train on your scripts.
What it doesn't do
It does not generate scenes. It does not autocomplete dialogue. It does not write coverage or notes on your behalf. There is no button that turns a logline into a script, and there will not be one.
The four vows
- We will never write the writer's work for them.
- We will never sell the writer's work to anyone.
- We will never tell a studio our tool replaces a writer.
- We will say what we believe in public and live with the cost.
A principle you keep internal is just a preference. A principle you say out loud — where writers and press and the WGA can read it — is a constraint on our own behavior. That is the point.
What we will not build
- No blank-page scene generation
- No “write a script from a logline”
- No auto-coverage or auto-notes that bypass the writer
- No features designed as replacements dressed as productivity tools
- Nothing sold to studios as “reduce writer headcount”
- No monetization of user-written work — no training data sales, no resale, no syndication, ever
This list is on our public site, not buried in a privacy policy. If we violate it, you can point here.
The deal
Your scripts export to Final Draft and Fountain on demand. Your data leaves with you if you do. We will never use what you wrote to build anything that competes with you. The work stays yours.
If you want a tool that writes for you, we are not it. If you want one that stays out of your way and keeps your work consistent, we are building it.