The Margin vs SFD

Track every writing session. Watch your manuscript grow. The Margin helps you build a consistent practice — one page at a time. LOG EVERY SESSION Finished a writing sprint? Log your word count, chapter, mood, and notes. WATCH YOUR MANUSCRIPT GROW Your home screen shows a manuscript stack that grows with every session. See your total word count, daily progress, and how close you are to your goal. TIMED WRITING SESSIONS Set a timer and write. A rotating collection of writing tips and craft quotes motivates you while the clock runs. TRACK MULTIPLE PROJECTS Working on a novel and a screenplay? Each project gets its own session history, word count, and progress bar. KNOW YOUR PATTERNS Weekly, monthly, and yearly insights show you when you write best, how consistent you are, and where your streaks land. Stats include average words per session, best writing day, and words-per-week trends. STREAKS AND MILESTONES Every day you write counts. The Margin tracks your current streak, personal best, and milestones like your longest streak and biggest session. MOOD TRACKING Tag each session with how the writing felt: dry, grinding, steady, flow, or sparks. Over time, see which moods correlate with your best output.

Writing apps help with the easy half — outlines, fonts, folders, word-count trophies. The hard half is producing a bad first version of something, and that's all SFD does. SFD is forward-only. You write in a burst, the earlier lines dim and scroll away, and you can't go back to fix them. You can't edit a draft into existence, so SFD won't let you try until it's out. How it works: — A go is a timed burst. You write. You don't reread. — Stall for a few seconds and you get a shove — a nudge that gets blunter the longer you stare at the cursor. — Hit a line you hate? Drop a later and keep moving. Your flags become a punch-list for when you revise. — A finished part is a chunk. A stack of chunks is the Pile — your whole first draft. — When it's done, send it out as plain text, to wherever you actually revise. Drafting is free. Every go, every later, every export — no account, no trial clock, no nagging. THE BIG MONTH is free too: 50,000 words of a novel's first draft between November 1 and 30. SFD shows your words today and how many a day finishes it, lights up a November calendar on every day you write, marks 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000, and gives you a BIG MONTH 2026 stamp and finisher card you can only earn that November. One thing costs money: SFD Habit Tracking, a 99-cent one-time unlock for the habit layer — the streak map and year wall, the month goal, the quiet reminder, stamps, share cards, and the home-screen widget, which carries THE BIG MONTH in November. The scoreboard, not the game. If you bought SFD back when the app itself cost money, the habit layer is yours automatically. What SFD won't do: format, outline, sync, collaborate, or write the draft for you. You write the bad version. A chunk has to get written; inside that, anything goes. Your words stay yours. Every chunk is a plain-text file on your device. No proprietary format, no servers. SFD makes no network calls at all — it can't lose your words and it can't trap them. Get the first draft out. You can make it good later, somewhere with a real keyboard.