About Koubou 工房
Koubou is an AI-assisted studio for writing and creating that runs in your browser. It saves your facts, voice, formats, and prompts next to your work, so you stop rebuilding them in every new chat.
Made for writers, marketers, consultants, educators, researchers, and founders who already use AI and care how the result reads.
01
Most people who use AI for real work fall into the same routine. Open a chat, paste in the background, explain the voice again, remind it of the format, fix the same mistakes. Then do it all again tomorrow. Koubou fixes that in three steps.
Write down the things you keep telling AI. Facts about your business or a client go in an Artifact. Your voice and standards go in a Role. The format of a piece, like a case study or a product update, goes in a Blueprint. Each one is a short, plain document you can read and change.
View full screenshot Koubou does not search your files and guess what is relevant. There is no hidden retrieval step and no black box. A prompt gets the pieces you put in it and nothing else. You can copy the fully assembled prompt and read exactly what the model will see, so when a result is off, you know where to look.
Anything you do often, like tightening a paragraph, drafting a product update, or turning notes into an outline, can become a Smart Prompt. A job with several steps can become a Workflow. Both show up in a panel next to your document while you write, so running one takes a single click.
View full screenshot Smart Prompts and Workflows get their context from variables. A variable is a name in double curly braces. Right before the prompt is sent, Koubou replaces it with the real content. Some variables pull in your saved pieces, like an Artifact or a Role. Others pull text from your document, like the text you selected or everything above your cursor.
A Smart Prompt, written once
Write the next paragraph, continuing from {{lastParagraph}}.
Stay on the topic of {{currentHeading}}.
Use the voice in {{role.HouseVoice}}.
Get every fact right using {{artifact.BusinessDetails}}.
Some of the variables that pull from your document:
{{selectedText}}{{aboveCursor}}{{belowCursor}}{{lastParagraph}}{{currentHeading}}{{outline}}{{wholeDocument}}{{selectedNote}}{{artifact.BusinessDetails.phone}}{{today}}You do not have to memorize any of them. The variable picker shows what is available where you are. If a variable cannot be filled, Koubou tells you instead of quietly sending the prompt without it.
View full screenshot Say your business details live in one Artifact, and 12 of your Smart Prompts use it. Then you raise a price. You edit the Artifact once, and all 12 prompts use the new price the next time they run. There is no list of prompts to hunt through, and no old price left in one you forgot about.
Artifact
Business details
Starter plan: $49 a month Starter plan: $59 a month
This is where you save time, and you save more the longer you use it. Every piece you save is one you never retype. Every new tool you build starts from pieces you already have.
Koubou calls all of this together your Creative Model. It is not an AI model, and nothing is trained on you. It is your own setup, and you can open and edit every part of it.
02
Here are the main parts of Koubou and what each one is for.
View full screenshot The main screen is called the Workbench. Your projects and files are on the left, the document you are working on is in the middle, and your tools are on the right.
Select a paragraph and run a tool on just that, or run it on a section or the whole draft. Your draft never has to be pasted into a chat window.
Notes hold research, half-formed ideas, and AI output you are not ready to put in the document. You can talk to AI about a single note, and use any note as context later.
Koubou can also search the web with sources for a prompt, import a Google Doc and send it back, and turn rows of a Google Sheet into Artifacts.
A Workflow is a chain of steps you build on a visual canvas. There are more than 20 kinds of step, including AI steps, loops, branches, forms, and writing to a document.
A Workflow can stop and wait for you. Put a review, an input, or an approval step wherever you want a person to decide before it continues.
View full screenshot A Sketch is a small web page, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, that runs inside Koubou. People use them for explainers, calculators, simulations, and lessons.
Design Systems hold your visual rules, like colors, type, and accessibility guidance, so every Sketch uses the same style.
03
Koubou is a one-time purchase. There is no subscription, no renewal, and nothing to cancel.
For comparison, ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro each cost $20 a month in the US as of September 2026. That is $240 a year. It is not a perfect comparison, because those plans include the AI and Koubou does not. With Koubou you pay OpenRouter for what you use, or run a local model through Ollama and pay nothing per request.
Koubou connects to OpenRouter, which offers hundreds of models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and many others. You can pick a different model for each task. Or connect Ollama and run models on your own computer.
ChatGPT runs OpenAI models and Claude runs Anthropic models. Koubou sells no AI credits and adds no markup, so you pay OpenRouter its own rates. When a better model comes out, your saved setup still works with it.
Your documents, notes, and tools are stored in your browser, on your computer. Koubou's servers handle your account and your license, and that is it. ChatGPT Projects, Claude Projects, and Notion keep your content in their cloud.
Two honest caveats. When you run an AI request, the content you chose for it is sent to that AI provider. And because your work is stored in your browser, backups are your job. Koubou can back up automatically to a folder or to Google Drive.
In ChatGPT and Claude Projects, you attach instructions and files to a project, and every chat in that project gets all of it. For work that fits in one project, that works well.
Koubou keeps facts, voice, structure, and tasks as separate pieces. A launch email might use your product Artifact, your brand Role, and an email Blueprint. Next week, a blog post might use the same product Artifact with a different Role. Update a fact once, and every prompt that uses it gets the new version.
AI edits can be undone. The review panel lists findings and suggested edits for the exact passage, and you apply them one at a time.
Text that AI inserted is marked with the model, the source, and the time. Months later, you can still tell what you wrote and what you did not.
04
Koubou is for people who already use AI and are tired of explaining the same things to it every day. In practice, that usually means:
05
I'm Chad Thiele. I design, build, and support Koubou myself. When you email support, I am the one who reads it and writes back.
I live in Tokyo. I have spent more than 27 years in military and civilian work, most of it in cybersecurity, and I hold a CISSP. I have been building AI tools since 2021, starting with Chibi AI, and I started on Koubou in 2025.
Koubou came out of my own frustration. My best AI work depended on everything around the prompt. The background, the voice, the format, the corrections I had already made twice. I kept rebuilding that in fresh chats and losing it in old ones. So I built a place to keep it.
The name comes from 工房 (kōbō), Japanese for a workshop or studio. That is what I wanted to build. A place to keep your tools between jobs.
Founder, designer, developer, and support desk
06
There is no sales call, onboarding session, or account manager. It is software, so you can start as soon as you have paid.
Checkout runs through Polar. You pay $99, plus tax or VAT where it applies. Polar emails your receipt and gives you a customer portal where your license key is available.
Go to app.koubou.tools and sign in with your Google account.
Connect OpenRouter for hosted models, Ollama for local ones, or both. Enter your license key. You can also pick a backup folder now, or skip it.
Presets install ready-made tools you can edit, so you do not start from a blank screen. Change them, or build your own pieces as you learn what works.
The built-in Help library has a guide for each part of Koubou, and you can ask AI questions about any guide. For anything else, email [email protected]. I answer those myself.
07
08
No. Koubou costs $99 once, plus tax or VAT where it applies.
AI usage is separate. OpenRouter bills you for what you use, and a local model through Ollama costs nothing per request.
No. Koubou connects to AI models, but it does not include one.
You connect OpenRouter, Ollama, or both, and choose the model for each task.
No. Koubou has no hidden retrieval step that guesses what is relevant.
A prompt gets the Artifacts, Roles, Blueprints, notes, and document variables you put in it, and nothing else. You can copy the fully assembled prompt to see exactly what the model receives.
Not directly. Koubou connects to OpenRouter and Ollama, not to the ChatGPT or Claude apps.
You can still copy the fully built prompt, with all the context you picked for it, and paste it into any AI chat you like.
Projects work well when everything fits in one project.
ChatGPT and Claude Projects can hold project context: instructions and files shared by every chat in the Project. Every chat gets all of it, and none of it leaves that one service. Koubou keeps your material as separate pieces you edit once and deliberately compose across tasks. The system you build works across models, too.
It is the name for everything you build up in Koubou. Your projects, documents, notes, and saved pieces, taken together.
It is not an AI model. Nothing is trained on you, and Koubou does not send all of it to AI. You pick what each task uses.
In your browser, on your computer. Koubou does not store your creative workspace on Koubou servers.
When you run an AI request or use a Google feature, the content needed for that action goes to that service.
No. Each browser holds its own workspace.
To move, download a complete backup on one computer and restore it on the other.
Not fully. Signing in, checking your license, and hosted AI all need an internet connection.
Ollama runs on your own computer, so AI requests to a local model do not go over the internet.
Koubou is built for a laptop or desktop browser. It is not designed for phones.
Not by itself. Koubou does not judge your writing.
It makes it easy to save and reuse the facts, voice, and instructions that get you good results. The ideas, the taste, and the final call are still yours, and the result still depends on your sources and the model you pick.
No. Instead, every purchase has a 14-day money-back guarantee.
If Koubou is not right for you, email support within that window and you get a full refund. No reason needed.
Pay once and it is yours. If it turns out not to be right for you, you have 14 days to get a full refund. No reason needed.
Already bought it? Log in.