by Nasadiya Technologies Pvt Ltd
Pratilipi is India's largest self-publishing and storytelling platform, built by Nasadiya Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in Bengaluru. Founded in 2014, the company's own About page states 2.5 Cr+ (25M+) readers, 27 L+ (2.7M+) stories and 2.7 L+ (270K+) writers — figures Wayback Machine snapshots show unchanged since at least February 2023, so treat that as a stale floor. More recent numbers come from co-founder Ranjeet Pratap Singh, quoted by Entrackr in August 2026: over 20 million stories and roughly 7.2 lakh (720,000+) active creators — the two company sources disagree by an order of magnitude on writers (see FAQs for detail). Pratilipi supports 12 Indian languages, per its official About page: Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Odia. Total funding raised is over $100M (Entrackr, April 2025): a $50.2M Series D led by Krafton in 2021 and a $20M Series E led by Jungle Ventures in April 2025, which valued the company at $100M — down from $265M the round before. The platform goes beyond text stories — audiobooks, podcasts, comics (Pratilipi Comics), and vertical video dramas. Writers publish directly without gatekeepers, and successful stories get adapted into web series, films, and audiobooks. Per Pratilipi's own writer-earnings blog (May 2026), authors earn 36% of reader-purchased coin value spent unlocking chapters, plus a cut of Premium/Superfan subscriptions. The only dated, first-party earnings breakdown found is a September 2021 blog post: that month the top 2 authors earned Rs 50,000+ each and the top earner crossed Rs 1 lakh. Higher figures (Rs 80,000-100,000+/month) circulate in press coverage but aren't confirmed on any current Pratilipi page — treat as anecdotal. A widely-repeated claim that 55% of writers are women, or that 39 of the top 40 earners in January 2025 were women, has no first-party source, so it's left off this page. Reading is free — Play Store shows in-app coin purchases from roughly Rs 10 to Rs 4,100 per item. Premium unlocks exclusive stories, ad-free reading, and early access. Compared to Wattpad — Toronto-founded 2006, acquired by Korea's Naver for $600M in 2021, now under Naver's Webtoon Entertainment, 50+ languages but English-dominated — and Medium (non-fiction, no vernacular), Pratilipi is purpose-built for Indian regional-language fiction. Best suited for vernacular readers and aspiring writers building an audience without publishing barriers; strongest in Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil fiction. As a self-publishing platform, quality varies widely. Pratilipi's terms ban obscene, hateful and anti-national content and let it remove violations at its discretion, with a named grievance officer, but nothing is pre-screened before publishing — moderation is reactive. iOS couldn't write or publish for years; Apple's release notes show that changed with version 5.1.0 on 16 July 2026, adding series writing on iOS, though the tools remain newer than Android's.
Nasadiya Technologies Pvt Ltd
4.8/5 on Google Play Store, India (gl=IN) — 4.85 raw average (displays as 4.8) from 906,187 ratings, package com.pratilipi.mobile.android, checked 2 Sep 2026. Previously stored as 4.9. · Last verified 2026-09-02
Reading the basic library is free. Pratilipi makes money through in-app purchases — its Google Play listing shows items priced from roughly Rs 10 to Rs 4,100 each, which is the coin system readers use to unlock locked chapters and tip writers. On top of that there's a Premium subscription that unlocks exclusive stories, removes ads, and gives early access to serialised content; Pratilipi's own site doesn't publish a fixed subscription price on its About or help pages, so check the in-app price for your account rather than assuming a flat rate. Writers publish for free — there's no cost to create an account or post a story.
12, per Pratilipi's own About page: Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Odia. Note that this is the official list — some third-party write-ups (and an earlier version of this page) list Assamese instead of English, which doesn't match what Pratilipi's own site states. The platform is strongest in Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil fiction based on community activity, though Pratilipi doesn't publish a per-language breakdown of readers or writers.
The core mechanism, per Pratilipi's own writer-earnings blog post (updated May 2026): readers spend coins to unlock locked chapters, and the writer gets 36% of the rupee value of those coins — the blog's own example is "200 Pratilipi coins worth Rs. 100" earning the author Rs 36. On top of that, writers can earn from readers subscribing directly to them (a "Superfan" subscription) and from the platform-wide Premium subscription when Premium readers engage with their locked chapters, though Pratilipi doesn't publish the exact split for those two. For a sense of scale, the only dated, first-party earnings breakdown we found is a company blog post from September 2021: that month the top 2 authors earned Rs 50,000+ each, 16 authors crossed Rs 10,000+, and the single top earner, Priti Jadhav, crossed Rs 1 lakh. Higher figures for named authors — Rs 80,000 to Rs 100,000+/month — appear in press coverage from 2025 but aren't confirmed on any current Pratilipi page, so treat those as anecdotal rather than typical.
Yes — the operating company, Nasadiya Technologies Private Limited, is incorporated and headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka (Sona Towers, Krishna Nagar Industrial Area, per its own About page), and was founded in 2014 by five co-founders: Sahradayi Modi, Sankaranaryanan Devarajan, Prashant Gupta, Rahul Ranjan and Ranjeet Pratap Singh. It has raised over $100M in total funding (Entrackr, April 2025), including a $50.2M Series D led by Korean gaming company Krafton in 2021 and a $20M Series E led by Singapore-based Jungle Ventures in April 2025 — that latest round valued Pratilipi at $100M, down from a $265M valuation the round before. Pratilipi hasn't published a public cap table, so we can't state exact ownership percentages the way we can for, say, a listed company — but unlike some India-founded platforms, there's no disclosed single foreign shareholder holding a majority stake.
Different home markets and different depth in Indian languages. Wattpad was founded in Toronto in 2006, was acquired by Korean internet giant Naver for roughly $600M in 2021, and today operates under Naver's Webtoon Entertainment. Wattpad advertises stories in 50+ languages, but in practice its content and community skew heavily English. Pratilipi was built specifically for Indian-language self-publishing from day one, with 12 supported languages and — per Pratilipi's own About page — the tagline "the only online platform in India that caters to literature in regional languages." If you want to read or write in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi or one of Pratilipi's other seven languages with a large existing community, Pratilipi is the more purpose-built option; for English-language fiction with a bigger global audience, Wattpad has the larger reach.
There are written rules, but enforcement is reactive rather than pre-screened. Pratilipi's terms of service prohibit published work that is, in the platform's own wording, "grossly harmful, infringing, harassing, blasphemous defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable," content that threatens India's "unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty," and anything that could harm minors. The company reserves the right to remove violating content and suspend or terminate accounts, and names a grievance officer (Jitesh Donga) for complaints, with a stated 15-day resolution window. What the terms don't describe is any pre-publication screening — as a self-publishing platform, anyone can post immediately, and moderation happens after a story is live and reported, not before. Users who want curated, editorially-vetted fiction should expect inconsistency in quality and, occasionally, content that should have been caught sooner.
The honest answer is that Pratilipi's own numbers disagree with each other, depending on which of its channels you check. Its official About page states 2.5 Cr+ (25M+) readers, 27 L+ (2.7M+) stories and 2.7 L+ (270K+) writers — but Wayback Machine snapshots show those exact figures unchanged since at least February 2023, so that page is a stale floor, not a live counter. Separately, co-founder Ranjeet Pratap Singh told Entrackr in August 2026 that the platform hosts over 20 million stories and has roughly 7.2 lakh (720,000+) active creators — a very different writer count from the About page's 2.7 lakh. We've used the more recent, directly-attributed Entrackr figures elsewhere on this page, but neither source is an audited or clearly-dated snapshot, so treat any specific number you see quoted for Pratilipi's scale — on this page or anywhere else — as approximate.
That is Pratilipi. Nasadiya Technologies Private Limited is the registered company name behind the Pratilipi reading app, and it is the name Google Play lists as the developer — so it is the name that shows up on your card or UPI statement rather than the word 'Pratilipi'. The charge is almost always either a Pratilipi Premium subscription or a purchase of coins used to unlock locked chapters; Pratilipi's Play listing shows in-app items priced from about Rs 10 up to Rs 4,100 each. If you did not intend to buy anything, check whether someone using the device bought coins, since those are one-tap purchases. It is not a fraudulent charge or an unknown merchant.
Because the billing runs through Google Play, you cancel it in Google Play rather than inside the Pratilipi app. On Android open the Play Store, tap your profile picture, go to Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions, select Pratilipi and choose Cancel subscription. On iOS the equivalent lives under Settings, your Apple ID, then Subscriptions. If the debit is a UPI AutoPay mandate, you can also revoke the mandate directly in your UPI app under autopay or mandates. Cancelling stops future charges but does not refund a charge already taken — for that you need to raise a refund request with Google Play, which has its own time limits.
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