For education
Free for the classroom
If you teach interactive narrative, game writing, or scenario design, TaleShard is free for your institution. We would rather agree the details with you than publish a table we invented before meeting a single course.
Why it fits a classroom
Built for a lab, by accident
None of these were built for teaching. They just happen to be exactly what a course needs.
Nothing to install
It runs in a browser. That is the whole setup on a locked-down lab machine, and it is the same tool on a student's laptop at home. No licence server, no per-machine activation, no IT ticket before week one.
Reviewing student work costs nothing
Viewer seats are free, and roles are Admin, Editor, and Viewer. An instructor can open every group's project to read, comment on, and assess it without occupying a paid seat.
Group projects that survive contact
Several students can work in the same project at once, with one shared undo history rather than four people overwriting each other. Organizations are invite-based, so a cohort is a cohort.
Playtest inside the lesson
Play mode runs the story in the browser — as a visual novel, a chat log, or a book — with variables and conditions evaluated live. No build step and no engine round-trip, so a student sees the consequence of a branch in the same minute they wrote it.
The work leaves with the student
A whole project exports as a portable archive, media included. Coursework does not become hostage to a licence that lapses at graduation, and it can go into a portfolio or into Unity and Unreal.
The programme
What free means here
- Accredited institutions
- Free, on our hosted service, renewed each year. Non-commercial teaching use — a course, not a studio operating inside a university.
- Students on a participating course
- Covered by their institution's grant. Any student outside one can use the Free plan, which needs no application and no card.
- Instructors
- Viewer seats are free on every plan, so supervising and assessing student projects is not a line item.
- AI credits
- An allocation agreed per course rather than an open tap. Credits are the one part of TaleShard with a real cost per use, and we would rather size it honestly with you than advertise "unlimited" and reverse it in March.
- On-premise deployment
- Available and quoted separately — it is part of Enterprise, not of the free grant. If your institution requires narrative data to stay on its own infrastructure, say so early and we will scope it.
Applying
There is no portal — there is a person
Every application is read by hand. That is not a gap we are apologising for while we build an automated one: TaleShard is new to teaching, and each course we set up teaches us what the next one will need. Write to us with the following and you will get a real answer, not a queue position.
- Your institution's name and website
- Your role, from an institutional email address
- The course, and roughly how many students are on it
- When the term starts, so we can be ready before you need it
- Whether your institution has data-residency rules we should know about
Ready when you are
Put "Education" in the subject line so it reaches the right place.
We are new at this
TaleShard is still in development and no course has run on it yet. So rather than invent a programme with tiers and quotas, we are starting with a principle — teaching should not be the thing that pays for a tool — and working out the mechanics with the first institutions that take us up on it.
If that means your course needs something not described above, that is useful to us rather than inconvenient. Tell us what it is.