Company

Our Mission

OutaStory exists so that a finished story can reach readers without needing anybody's permission first. Publishing is free and takes minutes: no fee, no cut taken up front, no submission queue. You set the terms the story goes out under — all rights reserved by default, or public domain, or one of six Creative Commons licences — and if you leave, the rights you granted revert to you.

That is a deliberately small promise, and it is the one we measure ourselves against. Everything else here — the catalogue, the audio, the apps, the revenue share — exists to make it true for more people: somebody who has written something worth an evening and has no route to anyone who would spend one on it.

Leadership and team

OutaStory GmbH is led by Thimo Buchheister, one of its three founders and its CEO, who is recorded as Geschäftsführer (managing director) in the German commercial register. Kai Flatau, co-founder and COO, holds Prokura for the company and is also its appointed Data Protection Officer. The full team — nine people, each named with their role — is on the team page.

Meet the team

Our Vision

We want to build the largest community of people who write, read and listen in German and English — one that argues well: open, fair, direct and constructive. Writers and members meet here over the same thing, a story worth the evening it takes.

We are early, and we would rather say so than dress it up. OutaStory went into public production in July 2026, the catalogue and the tooling are ahead of the audience, and the work now is the unglamorous half — making the thing good enough that people tell each other about it.

The Platform

The product itself is ours. The reader, the editor, the cover designer, the audio pipeline, the search and the apps are written here rather than assembled out of somebody else's platform, which is why it can change quickly and why the changes land where writers and members actually feel them.

It runs on Microsoft Azure, and for the handful of things nobody should build themselves it uses named outside services: sign-in, payments, email, speech synthesis, error tracking. Every one of them is listed by name in the privacy policy, because a supplier you cannot name is a supplier nobody can check.

Reading and listening are free and carry advertising. Premium is a single tier that changes the reading experience and never the catalogue: it removes the ads, allows offline downloads in the apps and highlights the text as it is narrated — monthly or yearly, on your account rather than on a device. Writing happens on the web or in the apps on a tablet or a desktop.

What is actually built

The catalogue is filed in 713 categories under 25 genres, four levels deep, with a browsable page at every level, and it carries 8,273 mirrored German public-domain works alongside the stories written here. Serialised stories release a chapter at a time, with a date the author expects the next one by. Favourites, reading position and settings follow the account rather than the device.

A growing share of stories can be listened to as well as read, narrated by high-definition neural voices with Azure Speech as the default engine, and the player says when a voice is synthetic. Contests run on the platform under published terms with a named jury. And every story carries an age rating on the five German youth-protection bands, which the catalogue filters on everywhere.

The Community

Members discuss stories in the open and give feedback under rules that are published rather than improvised. Comments, ratings and follows are how a story finds its second and third reader, and a writer willing to be told something gets better here faster than alone.

Moderation is work rather than a policy page. Comments are screened before they appear, AI-written comments are against the rules because the point is real people talking to real people, and a report reaches a person who acts on it. A story found to break the youth-protection or hate-speech rules is blocked at once and its author told.

Responsibility

OutaStory is a German company and the platform is run under German and European law. That is not paperwork: it decides how long an IP address is kept, what a data request has to hand back, and why the privacy policy names every processor that touches personal data. Your data sits in EU regions, and you can export or delete your account from your own profile without writing to anybody.

The same goes for AI. Generative tools are allowed to writers, with a duty to label a story drafted or substantially co-written with one; AI-generated cover art carries a machine-readable provenance marker under the EU AI Act's transparency rules; synthetic narration is disclosed in the player before you press play; and a reader who wants none of it can switch AI-assisted work out of their feeds.

What We Stand For

Stripped of the paragraphs, this is what we are trying to hold to.

• Writers publish without friction and choose the licence their story carries
• Readers enjoy variety and exciting new stories — flexible and fair
• A vibrant community that lets stories grow and travel further
• Because every story deserves to be read