Manuscripts is a Mac app for academics who've outgrown the spreadsheet. Draft, submit, revise, and repeat. Most tools pretend to be project managers or reference managers. Manuscripts does one thing: it tracks where your papers are in the submission journey—which journal, which round, which reviewers' comments triggered which revisions. One-time purchase. No subscription. No cloud. Your data lives on your Mac. Built for how academic work actually feels: slow, iterative, and often unglamorous.
I was tired of losing track of version numbers and embarrassingly scolded by the editor for a missing response to a reviewer's concern, a citation not in the journal's required format, or that extra checklist required at 2nd submission that's not the conflict of in interest form, nor the author contribution form. So, what started as an app to help me publish moire efficiently and with less stress, has turned into Manuscripts, available now to you as well. Please ask questions and share how Manuscripts has helped you organize revisions, track submissions, and stay sane (despite Reviewer 2). - Jamie
What happens after acceptance? Does the workflow just end or is there a post-acceptance phase? Congrats on the launch!
The "outgrown the spreadsheet tracker" insight is universal — academics, founders, and project-finance modelers all hit the same wall: a workbook starts as a tracker and gradually becomes a brittle source of truth that no one trusts. The fix is usually a tool that owns the workflow shape (state machine: drafted, submitted, revised, accepted) instead of a free-form grid. I see the same in finance — we ship valuation and project-finance templates on Eloquens (https://www.eloquens.com/channel/samir-asadov-cfa) precisely because the template encodes the state machine, not just the cells. Question: do you let users define their own status taxonomy or is the journey fixed (drafted → submitted → revised → final)? Different journals have different conditional-revision steps that don't map cleanly to a linear flow.
This is a very specific and very real writing workflow pain. The hard part with academic manuscripts is not only tracking “which draft is current,” it’s remembering why a revision happened and which reviewer/editor constraint it was meant to satisfy.
I like that you’re treating the submission journey as its own object instead of trying to force it into generic project management. Do you find academics mostly struggle with version/control chaos, response-to-reviewer tracking, or just the emotional load of keeping the whole process straight?
About Manuscripts.app on Product Hunt
“For academics who have outgrown the spreadsheet tracker”
Manuscripts.app launched on Product Hunt on May 9th, 2026 and earned 85 upvotes and 4 comments, placing #11 on the daily leaderboard. Manuscripts is a Mac app for academics who've outgrown the spreadsheet. Draft, submit, revise, and repeat. Most tools pretend to be project managers or reference managers. Manuscripts does one thing: it tracks where your papers are in the submission journey—which journal, which round, which reviewers' comments triggered which revisions. One-time purchase. No subscription. No cloud. Your data lives on your Mac. Built for how academic work actually feels: slow, iterative, and often unglamorous.
Manuscripts.app was featured in Mac (103.5k followers), Productivity (651.8k followers) and Education (78.5k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 169k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Manuscripts.app?
Manuscripts.app was hunted by Jamie Forrest. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Jamie Forrest