Writing and content decision
Revise
A single developer can build a useful, limited self-hosted AI editor (tracked changes, rule-driven prompts, basic voice personalization) in a multi-week effort, but reproducing Revise's full product polish, model choices, and scale (and priority support/beta features) is costly and not fully covered by the minimal replacement.
Visit website↗$16/mo
$192/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off100 h to build
$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Revise alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Upload or create a document → send selections/chapters to an AI editing model → receive edits as tracked changes → accept/reject changes → save versioned document
What it still won’t have
- Vendor-hosted access to the exact proprietary model choices advertised (e.g., Claude Sonnet / latest vendor-selected models)
- Priority support, beta feature access, and other paid customer services
- The vendor's polished UX (document-scale workflow, integrated speech-to-text and read-aloud features) and Chrome extension polish at parity
- Any behind-the-scenes model optimizations and telemetry the vendor applies
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal AI-assisted manuscript editor using Next.js (React) + Tiptap or similar rich-text editor, Postgres (or Supabase) for storage, and an AI model provider (OpenAI/Anthropic) via their HTTP API. Core features in scope: user auth, create/open/save documents, per-document custom rules UI, send selected text to the AI with rules-prompts, receive and render edits as tracked changes with per-suggestion accept/reject, simple voice-personalization by storing example passages and prepending them to prompts, shareable read-only links, and a basic Chrome extension that opens documents or invokes the editor on-page. Out of scope: model training/fine-tuning, multi-tenant team billing, enterprise SSO, heavy offline-first sync. Include input validation, API error handling, request rate limiting, end-to-end tests for editor flows, and unit tests for prompt construction and diff application.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productRevise AI — The AI Editor for Writers
- official pricingRevise Pricing — Simple Plans for Writers & Teams
- open sourceprose/prose
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
