Questions, answered plainly.

The basics

What is Bible Anvil?

Bible Anvil is a Bible for reading and for study that forms you through the work you do in it — the reading surface is the anvil, and you are the metal. You read, mark, and build; your study takes shape and stays yours. It runs fully offline, needs no account to read, and never watches you.

When can I get it?

We plan to finish Bible Anvil in full — reading, study, and the whole sermon workshop — before we open it to everyone. Reserve your founding place and you’ll be the first to hear when it’s ready. We’ll write once, when it’s ready — not before.

How do I reserve a founding place?

Join the waitlist with your email. You’ll get one confirmation email to confirm you meant it, and then exactly one more message — the day it’s ready. That’s the whole relationship: no newsletter, no drip campaign, no selling your address to anyone.

What will it run on?

Seven platforms, at full parity: Android phone, Android tablet, iPhone, iPad, Windows, macOS, and the web in your browser. What you build on one is the same study on every other.

Will it run on an old or inexpensive phone?

Yes — that’s a design commitment, not an afterthought. Bible Anvil is built to run well on inexpensive, several-year-old Android phones with modest memory. If it stutters on a budget phone, we’ve failed the people we most want to serve.

Price & fairness

Is it free?

Reading Scripture is free, for everyone, forever — no account, no ads, no meter. That free reading floor is a promise, not a trial. The deeper study workshop is a paid subscription; the reading itself never sits behind a paywall.

What do the paid tiers cost, and what do they include?

There are two subscription tiers — one for study, one for pastors (which adds the full sermon workshop to the study tier) — with a monthly and an annual option, the annual gives two months free. Current figures live on the pricing page (the one place we keep them, so they’re never out of date in two places at once). The principle behind them matters more than the number: we never meter your study. Your tags, your highlights, the rules you write to surface verses automatically, your notes, the canon you read in — unlimited at every paid tier. We don’t sell you your own depth back in pieces.

Is there a free trial?

Yes — thirty days free, with the plan you choose unlocked in full from the first day. You pick the plan before the trial starts, because on both app stores a trial attaches to one specific plan; there’s no “try everything, decide later” month for us to offer. The thirty days come once, on whichever plan you start with — so if Pastor is where you’re heading, start there. Two mechanics worth knowing: the stores need a payment method on file before any trial can begin, and when the thirty days end the trial becomes the monthly plan — never the year-long one unless you’ve asked for it, and never without showing you the price first. Paying yearly costs less and is available at any time; it’s your choice, never our default. Cancel inside the thirty days and nothing is charged.

What happens to my work if I stop paying?

Nothing you built disappears. Everything you’ve made stays readable, indefinitely — you just stop making new premium work until you resume. Your export stays free, unlimited, and offline the whole time. Resubscribe and your study is exactly as you left it — every note, tag, and highlight where you put it. Founding members should read the founding-rate answer below as well: your work always comes back; the founding price comes back only if you return within about sixty days. A pastor who steps back keeps every sermon already written — still readable, still deliverable, still exportable. It’s the workshop that pauses, never the library.

Is there a founding offer?

Yes. Founding members lock a reduced rate for as long as they stay subscribed — it doesn’t expire on you later. The founding window is open for a fixed period with a published end date, and there’s no cap on how many people can take it.

One honest limit, so it can’t surprise you later: the locked rate lives with your subscription. Cancel and come back within about sixty days and it returns automatically. Leave it longer and the app stores can no longer restore that original rate; you’d return on the best offer we have for returning members instead. We’d rather you knew that now than found it out a year from now.

Reserve a founding place to be first in line.

What about people who can’t pay U.S. prices?

A pastor in Lagos should not pay U.S. rates. Bible Anvil prices to local means so the same study is within reach wherever you are. Fair local pricing and the founding rate never stack — you simply get whichever is lower.

Can I get a refund?

Thirty days free come first, so nothing’s taken before you’ve had a proper look. If you’re charged after that and didn’t mean to be, write to us and we’ll help you get it back. One thing we should be straight about: refunds are issued by Apple and Google on their terms, not ours — so the decision isn’t ours to promise. What is ours to promise is that we’ll be on your side rather than in your way.

Privacy & security

Do you track me or show ads?

No. No ads, ever. No third-party trackers, no advertising pixels, no selling data. This website doesn’t watch you either — there’s nothing here reporting your visit to anyone. Privacy isn’t a setting in Bible Anvil; it’s the architecture.

Do I need an account?

No — not to read. You can open Bible Anvil and read Scripture with no sign-up and no login. An account exists only where you genuinely need one (to carry a paid subscription across your own devices), never as a toll gate on reading.

Does it work offline?

Fully. Not a degraded “offline mode” with features greyed out — the whole reading and study experience works with no network at all, with no hidden calls home. The Church is often where the signal isn’t; Bible Anvil is built for exactly there.

What data do you actually collect?

For the waitlist: your email address and the timestamps of when you joined and confirmed — nothing else. Inside the app, your study belongs to you and lives on your device; we don’t harvest what you read, mark, or search. Our privacy policy lays out every processor and retention detail in plain language.

Can I verify your privacy claims instead of just trusting them?

Yes — that’s the point. Bible Anvil shows a human-readable log of every network request it makes, so its silence is inspectable, not merely promised. Build hashes are published so you can confirm the app you run is the app we shipped. And there’s an edition that makes network access impossible at the operating-system level, for readers who want certainty.

Does it run on de-Googled Android?

Yes, as a first-class target — de-Googled Android (such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS) is fully supported, with no Google services required. Bible Anvil is built to run where readers have deliberately stripped their phones back to the essentials.

What happens to my study if your company disappears one day?

You keep everything. Your study is always yours to read and export in open formats. And as a failsafe: if our servers ever go silent for around sixty days, the app permanently unlocks the full paid tier on your own device and offers a complete export — so your paid features survive us, too. We designed for our own absence on purpose.

Your study is yours

Can I get my study out of Bible Anvil?

Any time, free, and offline. Export your work in open formats — Markdown, CSV, PDF, OSIS, USFM, BibTeX, and JSON — so it’s readable far beyond us. Leaving is always a door, never a trap; a study you can’t take with you was never really yours.

Can I bring my notes in from other tools?

Yes. Bring notes across from personal-knowledge tools like Obsidian, Notion, and Logseq, and they arrive anchored to the verses they belong to. Years of work in another tool don’t get left behind.

If I change translations, does my markup survive?

Yes — because your Markup attaches to the verse itself, not to the words of any one translation. Switch translations and your highlights, notes, and tags follow the verse, unbroken. Your study is translation-proof by design.

Translations & canons

Which translations will be available?

A wide and growing library of translations, free to read within the reading floor — hundreds are planned, and a core set is bundled to open and read offline the moment you install, with no sign-up. Reading is the part we refuse to charge for.

Do you support the deuterocanon and the Ethiopian tradition?

Yes. Bible Anvil lets you read in the canon your tradition confesses — including the broader Ethiopian Tewahedo canon and books such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and Meqabyan — with honest notes on provenance and any gaps. We built on readers, not on a single narrow list.

Can I study the original languages?

Yes, without gatekeeping. Tap a word for a study of it, read a real reverse interlinear, search by grammar, and see how rare a word is at a glance — Hebrew and Greek opened up rather than locked behind a specialist’s door.

For pastors

What does Bible Anvil do for my week?

It carries the whole arc — from naming a sermon, through study and assembly, to structure, polish, preview, and Sunday delivery — in one place, on your own device. The study you do all week becomes the sermon you preach, without re-keying it into a second tool.

Do I need presentation software to preach from it?

No presentation software required. Your natural reading pace drives the congregation’s screen — the scroll is the controller, no clicker and no operator in the booth. And the congregation screen never goes blank. Ever: silent fallbacks make a visible presentation failure architecturally impossible.

Can I rehearse a sermon before Sunday?

Yes — you can hear your whole sermon read back in your own on-device voice while your media advances in sync, nothing leaving the device. It’s a dress rehearsal from the congregation’s seat, in private, before you ever step up.

If I cancel, do I lose my sermons?

No. Step down from Pastor and you land on Study: every sermon you’ve already written stays readable, deliverable, and exportable, and you can still preach it on Sunday. What stops is the workshop — writing new sermons, generating new media, the voice work. Stop paying altogether and your sermons are still yours to read and to export. The sermon stays yours.

About AI

Does Bible Anvil use AI? What does it do?

Where AI helps, it surfaces patterns and connections that are already in the text and hands them to you — the AI proposes, and you (or the pastor) dispose. It never interprets Scripture for you and never writes your devotions or your sermon. Our line for it is exact: AI may show you what is already there. AI may not tell you what is meant by it. The meaning is yours to find; the tool only helps you see.

Are the illustrations AI-generated Scripture art?

No. The images that can accompany your reading are a curated, theologically vetted library — chosen with care, not conjured. We’re building an illustrated Bible you can trust, image by image.

Accessibility

Is Bible Anvil accessible?

Accessibility is release-blocking for us — the Bible must be usable by every reader the church serves. Bible Anvil is built to a named, testable floor (WCAG AA and EN 301 549, the standard Europe’s Accessibility Act enforces), audited each release rather than left aspirational.

What does that mean in practice?

Larger text and larger touch targets with one tap; a single-tap alternative to every gesture; full screen-reader and braille support; an audio-first, eyes-free way to read and study; and your Markup spoken aloud, so a blind reader hears not just the verse but “highlighted, two notes, tagged.” Full access, no compromise.

The covenant & who we are

What is the covenant?

The covenant is our written list of what Bible Anvil will never do — never hold your study hostage, never harvest you, never abandon the app as dead software. It’s a promise with teeth: a public version, a changelog, and a channel to hold us to it. It becomes binding the day Bible Anvil opens to everyone; until then it’s published so you can read exactly what you’d be trusting.

Who makes Bible Anvil?

Bible Anvil is built in South Africa. We keep the maker in the background on purpose — people come and go; it is Bible Anvil making the promise. What stands behind the app is the covenant, not a personality.

How do I ask a question, report something, or request a feature?

The contact page lists every way to reach us and says where each one goes. For an idea or something that isn’t working, use the request-a-feature form — one form, name-optional, where you choose whether it’s a problem, an idea, or general feedback. If your concern is the covenant itself — a promise you think we’ve broken — write to covenant@bibleanvil.com, which we watch and answer.