Lucerna is a Mac app for writing the screenplay and running the production. One payment, no subscription.
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OPENING TITLES
One last thing. Which credit is yours?
The page will follow your chair. Change it anytime.
FADE IN:
INT. YOUR STORY - NIGHT
For people who write and produce fiction, from the script to the shooting day. macOS only, for now.
Lucerna carries your film from FADE IN to the last call sheet: a real screenplay editor and a complete production office in one native Mac app. You pay once. It's yours forever. Your talent was never meant to be a rental.
Full app. No sign-up. No credit card. No 'we'll remind you before it renews' email, because nothing renews.
Native macOS · Apple silicon · Works offline
That's the entire pricing model. You buy the app. The app is yours. The end.
EXT. THE INDUSTRY - DAY (ONGOING ROBBERY)
Somewhere along the way, the software industry decided your craft should be a rental. Pay monthly to type in Courier. Pay monthly to move colored strips around a board. Pay monthly so a server farm can read your unproduced screenplay and call it "a service". Miss a payment and the tools of your own trade lock you out like a repossessed van.
We think that's a racket. That's the technical term. A screenplay doesn't expire on the 1st of the month. A budget doesn't need a landlord. So we built the whole studio the old way, the honest way: you buy it, you own it, it works. Even in an airplane seat with the Wi-Fi off.
THE PIPELINE
Five rooms. One app. Zero re-entering your own data.
A Fountain editor (Fountain is the plain-text screenplay format) with reference-accurate pagination
Counts, continuity and search that run on your Mac, when you ask
Stripboard, call sheets, sides. Generated, not typed
Budgets with math you can verify, not just trust
Take logs, reports, the whole day zipped for editorial
THE HERO FEATURES
Not concepts. Not a roadmap. What the app does today, with the screenshots to prove it.
Every draft of your screenplay, drawn as colored lanes that part ways and meet again. Pin the moments that matter, compare any two drafts word by word, and bring any of them back with one click. Nothing you write is ever lost again. Rewrite fearlessly at 3 a.m.
Industry-standard pagination, regression-tested to match page count exactly against three real feature scripts, native Fountain or imported FDX alike, US Letter or A4. Lock a draft and the full 9-color industry revision cycle comes out right: White to Blue to Pink to Cherry, frozen numbering, margin asterisks, OMITTED pages and all. Colored paper, or a colored band on the header only, when the office won't print on stock.
Lucerna builds a day-by-day shoot order straight from the screenplay: locations grouped, cast availability respected, page limits honored. Then it hands you draggable strips (a stripboard is the shoot laid out one strip per scene), one board per unit. It even catches an actor double-booked on two units before anyone makes the call. Cut scenes go to the boneyard, the parking lot for everything you've dropped, and a producer can still find them in there.
Schedule a day and get a minute-by-minute call sheet (the page that tells everyone where to be and when) with sun-anchored call times, real sunrise and sunset computed offline, meal-penalty and turnaround warnings. Actors get sides, just the pages being shot that day, with a cover carrying your production's name, the call time and the revision color. At wrap, one button zips camera report, OK-takes CSV and sides into a Daily Bundle for editorial.
A tiny cost chip lives on every piece of your story: a prop, an actor, a location. Type a rate and it routes itself into the right budget account. Underneath, a deterministic ledger computes gross to net to true employer cost, every step inspectable. Send a report to a coordinator and the amounts they shouldn't see are redacted for real: they can't be recovered by subtraction either. One export produces a hashed audit bundle, PDF and spreadsheet inside, that an accountant or a bond company can re-check without owning Lucerna.
Counts first, no opinions: pages, scenes, read time, who speaks how much, how the script sits between day and night. Then, if you switch it on, a technical pass that looks for the things you forgot rather than the choices you made: a subplot introduced and never picked up again, a prop that changes hands between two scenes shot three weeks apart, a continuity break against the actual shooting order, a character named two ways. Semantic search finds any of it in seconds. It runs on your Mac's own silicon, your pages never leave the machine, and you can turn the whole thing off per project.
Your co-writer's cursor glides across the page in their own color, live. Send them a link, a file over AirDrop, or an iCloud share, and they're writing in minutes. No sign-up forms, just the Apple Account they already have. Edits travel between your machines, with Apple's own infrastructure as the fallback route: never through a server of ours, because we don't run one.
INT. THE REST OF THE STUDIO - CONTINUOUS
THE GRIMOIRE
The hero reel is the trailer. This is the film. Seven departments, one coherent app. Here's a taste of each.
THE EXORCISM
An honest comparison, category by category. Where we're different, and where we're not.
Every claim is based on Lucerna features already in the app. We compare categories of tools, not brands. And never vaporware, ours or anyone's.
INT. YOUR MAC - BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Semantic search, breakdown tagging, story analysis: all of it runs on your Mac's own silicon. No prompt leaves the machine. No server logs your twist ending. No terms-of-service update quietly starts "training on your content". Your unproduced screenplay is exactly as private as the drawer it used to live in. The one thing that does travel is live co-writing, and it travels between your collaborators' devices over Apple's own infrastructure, never through a server of ours.
THE PRICE
Two lifetime tiers. A real trial. And a number that never repeats itself.
7-day free trial · full app · no credit card · no sign-up
How it works: download Lucerna from the Mac App Store, use the whole app for 7 days, then unlock it with a single purchase. No card to start, no account to create, nothing to cancel. Requires a Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later.
€79
one payment, forever
The whole writers' room: editor, analysis, drafts, co-writing.
€349
or €270 if you already own Screenplay
The whole writers' room, plus the entire production office.
Both tiers are enforced in code, not in marketing: buy Screenplay once for €79, add Production later for €270, own both forever. One purchase covers the Macs signed in to your Apple Account. No renewals, no "contact sales", and an invoice to a VAT number is one email away. Requires a Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later.
FAQ
Really. Two lifetime tiers, one payment each, enforced by the app's own licensing code. There is no monthly anything. The trial doesn't even ask for a card, so it physically cannot "forget" to stop charging you.
Screenplay is €79. Production is €349. If you own Screenplay and want the production office later, it's €270, the difference, and nothing you already paid is wasted. One payment each, through the Mac App Store: those are the store's prices, VAT included where it applies, and if you need an invoice made out to a company, write to support@luminosfilm.com. That is the entire price list, and it's the same list in every country we sell in.
Nothing is deleted. The projects you started during the trial stay yours and keep opening: you can read them, print them, and there's an Export Everything button that packages all the work you did during the trial, PDF and plain-text Fountain included, even if you never pay. What stops is editing, until you buy. We're not holding your pages hostage to close a sale.
No. Everything runs on your Mac: semantic search, breakdown tagging, story analysis, all of it. The deep features work with Wi-Fi off. Your script stays on your machine, where scripts belong.
In, yes. Out, partly, and here is the unvarnished version: there is no .fdx export yet. Import is at exact page-count parity, regression-tested against three real feature scripts, so the draft your production budgeted against stays the same length. On the way out you get reference-accurate PDF, US Letter or A4, and your entire draft history as plain-text Fountain, which every screenwriting app reads. Schedules and budgets do go both ways, in .mmsx and .mmb.
You send your co-writer a link, a file over AirDrop, or an iCloud share, and they're in, live cursors and all, in minutes. No Lucerna account, no sign-up form: the Apple Account they already have does the job. Their edits and yours travel between your machines, using Apple's infrastructure as the fallback route, and never through a server of ours, because we don't run one. Permissions are role-based, so whoever runs the schedule never touches your dialogue.
You both write. That is the case co-writing was built for: your cursors move across the page live, each in its own color with the name on it, and your edits merge instead of overwriting each other, because the app was made for two people typing at once rather than for one person at a time. Permissions are set per role, so what each of you can change follows the role you came in as. The history records every pass with its date, so who moved what, and when, is never a matter of opinion. And when the scene wants to go two ways, Story Alternatives holds both versions of it side by side until one of you decides, then weaves the surviving one back into the draft. Two people, one document, the same minute: that is what this is for.
A Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. The analysis models download once, they're a few gigabytes, and the download resumes if the line drops. PDFs come out US Letter or A4. There's an iOS companion for take logging on set, on the same network as your Mac. Intel Macs are not supported, and we'd rather say it plainly than hedge: Apple has retired Intel from its own development tools, and we won't sell you an app that's aging on the day you buy it.
One purchase covers the Macs signed in to your Apple Account: your desktop and your laptop, not the whole floor. Buying for a company, or need an invoice to a VAT number? Apple Business Manager handles volume purchases, or write to support@luminosfilm.com and a person will sort it out with you. We're Luminos Film S.r.l., Via Pietro Piffetti 48, Turin, VAT IT12361020014. There is a company here, with an address. The licence itself, the EULA, is published on this site under Legal: you can read it before you buy, instead of after.
What you're buying is Lucerna 26, and every 26.x update is included: fixes, new features, and keeping up with new versions of macOS. When a next major Lucerna ships someday, it will be a separate purchase and a choice, never a switch we flip on you: Lucerna 26 stays alive, licensed and working, keeps opening your projects, and nothing expires because you said no. Lucerna 26 also stays on sale: you can still buy it and install it after the next version ships, which matters if a writer joins your room in month fourteen and everybody has to be on the same build. And if we disappeared tomorrow, your projects are files on your own Mac, and the exports below don't need us to run.
Not today. A multi-platform version is in the works, honestly without a date: right now every hour goes into making the Mac version the best thing we have ever built, and we won't sell you a waiting list. If you want one email on the day a Windows build is real, write to support@luminosfilm.com and you'll get exactly that, one email.
Today, no, and we'd rather lose the sale than waste your afternoon. The schedule, the call sheets and the budget are all built from the screenplay: that is where Lucerna reads the scenes, the locations, the cast and the page count from. There is no way in that starts from a shot list or a storyboard with no script behind it. If that is where your work lives, an agency board, three lines of copy, a shoot on Thursday, then Lucerna doesn't do your job today. If you want to know the day that changes, write to support@luminosfilm.com and we'll tell you. No newsletter, just the answer.
You keep everything, twice over. Your projects live on your Mac, and one click exports your entire draft history as plain Fountain text. The production side comes out too, in formats other people's software opens: the schedule as .mmsx, the budget as .mmb and CSV, the breakdown as CSV, call sheets, sides, DOOD and reports as PDF. Even the audit bundle carries a PDF and a spreadsheet inside, so its numbers survive without us. Lucerna is deliberately built to not be a trap. Which is easy, because we have no recurring revenue to protect.
FADE OUT.
