A Ulysses alternative you buy once

Ulysses went to a subscription in 2017 and a lot of its users have been looking for the way out ever since. If what you want is a Mac writing app for long work, in Markdown files you own, for a single payment, this page is about Grasmere, which we make, and about the other apps that fit the bill when Grasmere doesn’t.

Download for macOS Free for 14 days, then $14.99 once · macOS 26+

What you’d be leaving

Be clear about it first. Ulysses is a very good app. Its iPad and iPhone versions are complete, its sync is reliable, it posts to WordPress, Ghost and Medium, and it makes ePubs. The subscription is $39.99 a year, or $5.99 a month. If you use all of that, it’s fair value and you should stay.

The reasons people leave are the ones you’d expect. The payments don’t stop. The texts live in Ulysses’s library, in its own Markdown XL, and the external-folder mode that works on plain files gives up embedded images, notes, goals and backups, by Ulysses’s own help pages. And it has no built-in way to work with anyone else, which its site says plainly.

Grasmere, for the Mac

Grasmere is a writing app for long work in plain Markdown files, bought once for $14.99 after a 14-day trial. The resemblance to Ulysses is a library of pieces of writing, organised, with goals and a clean page. The differences are what’s underneath and what’s around it.

Files, not a library. A project is any folder. Each chapter is a .md file in standard Markdown, which opens unchanged in any other app and syncs however your folders sync.
A book from its chapters. Chapters are cards with a synopsis and a status, dragged into order. The Publish stage makes one PDF in standard manuscript format or typeset as a book, or one Word document.
Sources and citations. Save web pages, add papers by DOI and books by ISBN, cite with [@, and the references are written in APA, Harvard, Chicago or MLA. Ulysses’s documentation doesn’t mention citations.
Review in Word. Send a chapter as Word and bring back the tracked changes and comments onto your own text.

What it lacks that Ulysses has: an iPad or iPhone version, ePub, and posting to blogs. It needs macOS 26 or later. It’s new, first released in October 2026.

Other apps you buy once

If Grasmere isn’t the fit, these are honest alternatives, with prices from their own sites on 9 November 2026.

iA Writer, $49.99 for Mac and $49.99 for iPhone and iPad, bought separately. The nearest thing to Ulysses’s page, on plain files, with an iPad version. No citations, no review round trip.
Typora, $14.99 for three devices, on Mac, Windows and Linux. A fine editor for a document at a time, with no tools for a book.
Scrivener, $59.99 for Mac, $23.99 for iOS. The full studio, with rich text in a project package rather than Markdown files.
Obsidian, free. A vault of notes on every platform; a book comes out of it through plugins.

There’s a fuller comparison in the best Scrivener alternatives for Markdown writers.

Moving from Ulysses

In Ulysses, select a group and export it as Markdown, one file per sheet, to a folder.
Open that folder in Grasmere. Each sheet is a chapter card.
Drag the cards into order. Check anything written with Markdown XL’s own tags, such as annotations, which arrive as the text Ulysses writes for them.
Cancel the subscription when you’re sure.

Questions

Is there an iPad version?

No. If you write on an iPad, iA Writer is the one to look at.

Will my Ulysses files open?

Once exported as Markdown, yes. Ulysses’s library itself isn’t a folder of files you can open elsewhere.

Is $14.99 really the whole price?

Yes. There’s no account and no subscription.

Bought once. Files you keep.

Grasmere is a Mac app for long writing in plain Markdown, with sources, citations, review and publishing built in. The trial is free for 14 days.