For members

A home for stories

OutaStory is a multilingual community for people who love stories. As a member you carry the whole library in your pocket: original fiction from our community of writers alongside more than eight thousand public-domain classics, ready to read or to hear. Nothing sits behind a paywall — every story is open to every reader.

There is nothing to install to get started on the web, and the same account follows you into our apps. Begin a chapter on your phone over coffee and finish it on your laptop that evening — your place is always kept. The reader, the help centre and the legal texts are all there in English and German.

Read or listen — your choice

Every published story is typeset for long-form reading, and a growing share can also be played as audio. Narration is produced with high-definition neural voices, so a story that was never near a recording studio can still be enjoyed hands-free on a commute or a walk. Where a story has audio, the player sits right on the story page.

Build a personal library by favouriting the stories you love, choose the reading theme, typeface, text size and line height that suit you — a dyslexia-friendly face among them — and let the reader remember exactly where you left off, down to the place in the chapter you had reached.

Follow a story as it unfolds

Not every story arrives finished. Writers can publish a serial and release it a chapter at a time, so there is a real difference between a story you can finish tonight and one you will be waiting on. The story page tells you which you are looking at, how many chapters are out, and roughly when the next is due.

Subscribe to a serial and we will tell you when the next instalment lands; follow an author and their new work turns up on your home page instead of you going looking. You choose which notifications you want and on which devices, and switching them off never cancels the subscription.

A library that learns what you love

Your home page is personal. As you read, OutaStory quietly learns which genres you return to, which authors you follow and rate, and whether you finish short stories or settle into long ones — then arranges fresh recommendations around all three, next to picks that readers with similar taste enjoyed.

When you would rather browse than be recommended to, the shelves are there for it: more than seven hundred categories across four levels, from twenty-five broad rooms like fantasy, romance, mystery and the classics down to the precise corner of fan fiction you were after. Search finds a story by title, author or description.

Made to be safe for every age

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, not only on the story page. A visitor who is not signed in is only ever shown stories rated 12 or below; anything rated higher, and anything an author has not rated at all, is withheld. Unrated counts as adult, deliberately.

OutaStory is operated by a German company under European data-protection law, which means the unglamorous answers are the ones you want: your data sits in EU regions, you can export everything we hold about you from your own profile, and you can delete your account without writing to anybody.

On the web and in your pocket

Read in any modern browser at www.outastory.com, or use the native apps: Android on Google Play, Fire tablets and Fire TV through the Amazon Appstore, iPhone, iPad and Mac on the App Store, and Windows from the Microsoft Store, winget or a direct download. Favourites, reading progress and settings stay in sync across all of them.

The apps keep reading when the network stops. Any story you have opened stays readable with no connection at all, and a small bundled starter set works on a device that has never been online. Offline reading is an app feature; the website needs a connection.

Free to read, Premium if you want more

Reading and listening on OutaStory are free, and the free experience is supported by advertising. Premium is a single tier with no levels inside it: it removes the ads, lets you download whole stories to keep offline in the apps — narration included, where it exists — and adds a read-along mode that highlights the text as it is narrated.

What Premium never does is put a story behind a subscription. It changes the reading experience, never the catalogue, and it is an entitlement on your account rather than on one device — so it follows you between the web and every app you sign into.

A community of real people

OutaStory is a place for constructive, respectful exchange. We moderate actively and have no tolerance for insults or hate speech — and our rules prohibit AI-generated comments, because we want real people connecting with real people over stories that real people wrote. Comments are screened before they appear, and reports reach a human.

There are gentler things here too. Rate a chapter or a whole story, leave a comment where the author will actually read it, follow the writers you want to hear more from, and collect the trophies the platform hands out along the way. And if a story deserves an audience of one, a gift link shares it with somebody who has no account.

Where AI is involved, we say so

We use AI in specific places and in the open: cover art, story descriptions, and the narration voices. Every AI-generated cover carries a machine-readable marker in its metadata declaring it as such, synthetic narration is disclosed in the player before you press play, and our assistant says what it is at the start of a conversation. A switch in your profile hides AI-generated content entirely.