Updated July 2026. Written by the team behind Auteurium; our own product appears once, clearly labeled, and this map is useful without it.
Across 2025, most of the infrastructure emerging screenwriters relied on for feedback and discovery shut down. WeScreenplay stopped taking coverage orders early in the year, ScreenCraft and The Script Lab followed, The Tracking Board closed, and Coverfly itself, the platform that tied the whole ecosystem together, was sunset by its parent company. The closures were covered widely in the trade press.
Background: No Film School on the Coverfly closure and the ScreenCraft, Script Lab, and WeScreenplay shutdowns.
Coverfly was really five services in one: contest submission tracking, peer feedback, paid coverage, portfolio hosting, and the Red List discovery layer. No single thing replaced it. Here is where each piece actually went.
FilmFreeway is where contest submission consolidated. Most major screenplay competitions now list there. Note one structural change: the Academy Nicholl Fellowship no longer runs as an open competition; entries route through the Black List and the Writers Guild Foundation, with a cap on submissions — the current submission path is its own guide. Contest slots got scarcer and entries got more expensive, which is worth knowing before you budget a contest season.
The Black List ($25 per month hosting, $75 per feature evaluation as of mid-2026) is the closest surviving analog to Coverfly's discovery function, because readership is the thing that cannot be rebuilt quickly. Honest caveat: nothing currently replaces the Red List's breadth, and any site telling you otherwise is selling something.
Stage 32 absorbed a lot of the displaced community. It is openly commercial, which some writers dislike, but it is large, active, and it launched a contest hub specifically to catch former Coverfly users.
| Service | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The Black List evaluation | $75 per feature | Short scored evaluation; readership attached |
| Shore Scripts | from $80 | Feature coverage |
| Story Pros | from $100 | Feature notes |
| Coverage Ink | from $129 | Long-running, detailed analyses |
| Script Reader Pro | from $169 | Working-writer readers, longer turnaround |
| Independent consultants | $120 to $500 per hour | Mentorship-shaped, not coverage-shaped |
Two honest warnings from years of writer forums: price and quality do not reliably correlate in this market, and reader-to-reader consistency was the chronic complaint about the coverage economy even before it shrank. Budget for the second read before you trust the first.
Pricing verified against each service's public pages, July 2026. See our companion piece: what script coverage costs in 2026.
Free and slow, but real: r/Screenwriting swap threads, Stage 32 lounges, Script Revolution, and local writer groups. The trade is time. A peer swap costs you a read of someone else's feature, and the quality varies as much as you would expect.
The newest tier, and the one with the most landmines. One-shot AI coverage reports run $10 to $45, and public tests have documented serious problems with the cheap tier, including tools that flatter everything they read. We wrote an honest guide to the whole category, including what AI cannot do: AI script feedback: what it can and can't do.
Auteurium is a screenwriting app with a development room inside it: calibrated AI readers that give development notes on your pages, in your editor, in minutes. It reads. It never writes your script. A full development read costs about $3 on the Pro plan, and the editor itself is free forever.
Where we honestly do not fit this map: Auteurium is not discovery and not industry access. No one reads your script on our side, there is no readership attached, and we will not get you a manager. What we replace is the development middle: the $75 to $200 reads writers used to buy between drafts. How our readers are tested is public, numbers and limits included: the bench. Where we stand on AI, signed: the stance page.
The old pipeline is gone and pretending otherwise wastes your money. What survived: the Black List for discovery, FilmFreeway for contests, a thinner set of human coverage services at higher effective prices, communities for peer reads, and a new AI tier that ranges from genuinely useful to actively misleading. Match the tool to the job: discovery money and development money are different budgets, and the most expensive mistake is spending discovery money on a draft that needed development first.