Supporting Scrite

The Grant

We are excited to award a grant of INR 3 Lakhs to Scrite, an open source, cross-platform screenwriting app. The grant will support server hosting, software licensing, code signing certificates, and legal document reviews for the project through 2027.

Structure, Order, Method

Sometime in December 2019, Prashanth was trying his hand at writing, writing screenplays particularly. While rewriting a screenplay, he started to feel that the app he was using was not keeping up with the way he imagined the story.

" In my head, stories show up in a particular shape. More specifically, the story shows up as an arrangement of elements, which arrangement has a shape. This is what I would like to call structure. A specific way of sequencing elements from the structure is what I would call a screenplay. While the existing apps helped me with writing the screenplay, I couldn’t find anything that helped me capture the structure." – Prashanth

He decided to write a simple desktop app for his own use, to capture the structure and to help with writing the screenplay itself.

Scrite is born

On 24th March 2020, when the country went into lockdown; stranded with nowhere to go for 21 days, he decided to stop rewriting his screenplay and build the app instead.

Cut to today, and Scrite has around 50,000 people writing in it, with close to 2,000 paid users. Currently, it supports English and a growing list of Indian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Sanskrit, and Assamese, with French, Vietnamese, and Japanese joining soon. Some of the films written in it have made it to festival screens.

What Built the Community

Screenwriting apps for the Indian market aren't as rare as just half-hearted about it. Language support usually meant a font pack; writers still ended up typing in transliterated English and converting later, breaking their flow.

Scrite went after a specific friction: type phonetically and watch it turn into Tamil or Kannada or Hindi script in real time. Writers who'd been living with the workaround recognized the fix immediately and told other writers. A production house in Bengaluru moved its entire writing staff over from a legacy tool. The Screenwriters Association gave Scrite a platform to demo to its members, and the writers who attended stayed.

There's a broader truth in here too, one that shows up in a lot of long-running open-source projects: growth rarely comes from chasing an audience. It comes from solving something real for a small group of people first, and everything after that tends to depend less on strategy than on which people you happen to run into along the way. It was building for a problem nobody else was taking seriously, and staying open enough to let the right people find it.

This grant will help Prashanth sustain Scrite’s infrastructure for the next year, so he can focus on building the product and a community around it. Prashanth has been an active part of the FOSS United community. Check out his talk at IndiaFOSS 2025 and this post where he mentions how the community helped him in his journey.