What OutaStory is

OutaStory is a place to read, listen to and write stories, in German and in English. Open a story and start reading — every one of them is free, and nothing sits behind a paywall. Open the editor and start writing, and publishing costs nothing at all: no fee, no cut taken up front, no queue to join.

It is one product rather than a family of them. The same catalogue, the same reader and the same account reach you in a browser, on your phone, on a tablet and on your desktop — and it is built and run by OutaStory GmbH, a registered German company whose details you can look up for yourself.

The pages below are the tour, sorted by what brought you here: reading, writing, lending your voice, talking to us as a publisher, or checking who we actually are. If you would rather have it in one read, the longer version carries on underneath them.

A catalogue you can browse, not only search

Stories are filed in a taxonomy of 713 categories under 25 top-level genres, and it runs four levels deep — from Mystery down to a Lokalkrimi set in one particular city. Every level has its own page at its own address, so narrowing from a mood to the exact shelf you meant takes a few clicks rather than a search box and some hope.

Alongside the stories written here, the catalogue carries a large mirrored collection of German public-domain literature: 8,273 works from rohtext.org, each marked as imported and linked back to where it came from. They are here because a shelf with nothing on it is not a library.

Read it, or let it read itself to you

Every published story is typeset for long reading, and the reader bends to you rather than the other way round: theme, typeface, size and line height are yours to set, with a dyslexia-friendly face among the choices. Where you stopped is kept on your account rather than on one device, so a chapter begun on a phone finishes on a laptop.

A growing part of the catalogue can be listened to as well. Narration is generated with high-definition neural voices — Azure Speech is the default engine — so a story that was never near a recording studio can still be heard on a walk. Where a story has audio the player sits on its own page, and it says plainly when a voice is synthetic.

Not everything arrives finished, either. A writer can publish a serial and release it a chapter at a time, and the story page tells you which kind you are looking at and when the author expects the next one. Reading and listening are free either way; Premium removes the ads, adds offline downloads in the apps and highlights the text as it is narrated.

Writing, publishing, and earning from it

The editor sits in the same product you read in — on the web, and in the apps on a tablet or a desktop; the phone layout is for reading. Drafts save as you go and stay private until you say otherwise, a cover can be built in the designer without leaving the page, and a story can go out complete or as a serial you release yourself.

You choose the terms your story carries: all rights reserved by default, or public domain, or any of six Creative Commons licences, set per story in the editor. And when a story earns advertising revenue, 55 % of it goes to the author and 45 % to the platform — the same split that applies to the subscription pool.

A writer who wants a human voice rather than a synthetic one can commission a narrator through the speaker marketplace: pick a voice, agree a price, and the finished recording is attached to the story. The speaker is paid out through Stripe Connect and OutaStory keeps 8 % of the commission.

Ratings, rules, and saying what we do

Every story carries an age rating on the five bands German youth-protection guidance uses — 0, 6, 12, 16 and 18 — and the whole catalogue is filtered by it on every screen. A visitor who is not signed in only ever sees stories rated 12 or below, and a story nobody has rated counts as adult. Comments are screened before they appear and reports reach a person.

Where AI is involved, we say so. Cover art made by a model carries a machine-readable provenance marker inside the image file under the EU AI Act's transparency rules, a synthetic narration voice is disclosed in the player, writers must label a story they drafted or substantially co-wrote with a generative tool, and one switch in your profile hides AI-assisted work from your feeds.

Read the full account of how this catalogue is made

Where to start

If you came to read, the catalogue is open without an account, and an account is what makes it remember you. If you came to write, the editor is a click from the home page and publishing is free. And if you came to check us out, the company and team pages name real people and link to public records that are not ours.