If your plan for getting read ran through Coverfly, you already know the platform is gone. The trouble is that most searches for coverfly alternatives turn up lists that treat it like one product with one obvious successor. It wasn't. Coverfly was a profile, a ranking, a contest scoreboard and an industry search tool rolled into one login, and each of those jobs now lives somewhere different, if it lives anywhere at all.
This guide maps each function to what actually exists as of September 2026. It gives you the real fees and windows for the contests we could verify against their own pages, and it's blunt about the parts that have no replacement. Where a number comes from a company's own marketing, we say so. Where nobody has published a number, we don't invent one.
What Happened to Coverfly
Coverfly was a platform where screenwriters could post work, show off contest placements and connect with agents and managers. It sat inside Industry Arts, which also owned ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay and The Script Lab. According to No Film School, Cast & Crew now owns that whole portfolio after acquiring Backstage, which had earlier acquired Industry Arts and Film Freeway.
The siblings went first. In early 2025, ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay and The Script Lab announced they were shutting down. The closest thing to a rationale in No Film School's coverage was the writer's own guess: "It seems like they're shutting down redundancies." That's commentary, not a company statement.
Coverfly followed. No Film School reports that the closure was announced on April 30, 2025, with a closure date of August 1, 2025. The announcement email described the shutdown as "part of the parent company's strategy," and that's as far as any official explanation went. Nobody at Cast & Crew or Industry Arts has publicly said more, so be wary of anyone who tells you confidently why it closed.
The reaction was sharp. No Film School's writer put it plainly: writers' accolades, "which I assume many of you spent money on via contests, will be completely gone." Coverfly's founder, Scott Lawrie, who had left the company years earlier, posted on Twitter/X that he "spent nearly a decade putting everything i had into creating coverfly" and that it was "agonizing to watch its downfall after leaving a few years ago."
The exact day writer profiles stopped loading is murkier than it should be. No Film School gives August 1, 2025; some writers remember access lasting a little longer. The safe version is that profiles went dark in the second half of 2025. What isn't murky is the current state: StoryNotes reported in July 2026 that coverfly.com had no DNS record, and a live check on 24 September 2026 failed with a host not found error.
Coverfly is fully offline
As of September 2026, coverfly.com does not resolve at all, so any placement that lived only on your Coverfly profile now needs a new home or a line in your query letter.
What Coverfly Actually Did, and Why No One Product Replaces It
Strip away the interface and Coverfly did four separate jobs.
Hosting. Your script and logline sat on a profile that industry users could search.
Ranking. The Red List aggregated your placements across partner contests into a single rank. A manager didn't need to know every contest; they could see who was rising.
Contest discovery. It was a directory of competitions, with the placements feeding back into your profile.
Access. Managers and agents used it to browse, which is the only reason the first three mattered.
That bundle is why the question "what replaced Coverfly" has no single answer. StoryNotes, a coverage vendor that competes in this space and so has a commercial interest in the framing, published a function by function map in 2026: hosting to The Black List, contest aggregation to Stage 32, Red List rankings to a Stage 32 legacy import, free peer feedback to Script Revolution and StoryPeer, and paid coverage to AI tools and boutique services. It's an opinionated summary rather than an authoritative ranking, but the shape is right. The same piece says Coverfly peaked in 2021 at 70,000 registered writers and 45,000 searchable projects; that figure appears in only one source, so hold it loosely.
“Coverfly was never one product, so there was never going to be one replacement.”
— Industry Comparison
The honest gap is the Red List. If you're hunting for a coverfly red list alternative, here's the uncomfortable part: we found no independent service that continues to rank writers across contests the way Coverfly did. Stage 32 lets former users import their old Red List rankings, which preserves a record of what you earned. That's valuable. It isn't a live leaderboard that new placements keep feeding, and no one has built one we could verify.
So stop looking for a clone. Decide which of the four jobs you actually need this year, then pick the tool for that job.
Coverfly Alternatives for Hosting a Script Where Industry Can Find It
The Black List
The Black List is the most direct answer to "where can a producer find my script." Its own help documentation describes three states a project can be in, as of September 2026:
- Online: searchable and available to industry professionals, for a "$30 monthly hosting fee" per project.
- Offline: no charge, and not visible.
- Listed: shows limited information and is not eligible for evaluations.
Hosting auto renews by default. If you only want a month or two of visibility after an evaluation lands, turn renewal off in the Hosting tab yourself, because nothing will do it for you.
Evaluations are the other half of the bill. No Film School reports them at $100 each and sums it up: "Hosting is $30 a month per project, and evaluations are $100 each. Together, that costs $130 per project you submit." StoryNotes reports the same two figures. We couldn't confirm the evaluation price on the Black List's own pricing page, which blocked our fetch, so treat $100 as reported pricing and check it at checkout.
The practical read: hosting without an evaluation is a listing nobody has a reason to click. Budget for both, or don't bother with online status yet.
Stage 32's Coverfly import
On July 24, 2025, No Film School reported that Stage 32 had launched a one click import letting former Coverfly users bring over scripts, loglines, awards and Red List rankings. Stage 32's own announcement says the imported data feeds a new Executive Portal and makes three claims worth quoting exactly, because they're its claims, not independently verified ones: "Our 3,000 Executives will now log into their Stage 32 Executive Portal," the service is "absolutely free," and "With Coverfly going out of business, it was imperative to us that you get to keep everything you've achieved."
According to No Film School, the portal surfaces the highest ranked scripts, projects with strong contest placements, and writers whom executives have given a "double recommend" status. If you had a Coverfly profile, log in and check that your placements actually made it across. It costs nothing to verify and it's the only surviving record of those rankings.
Free peer feedback
For the feedback side, StoryNotes points writers to Script Revolution and StoryPeer. Peer notes won't put you in front of a buyer, but they're a cheap way to find the problems before you pay anyone to find them.
The real hosting math
As of September 2026, Black List hosting is $30 a month per online project and evaluations are reported at $100 each, so one evaluated month runs about $130 per script.
Coverfly Alternatives for Contest Discovery
Coverfly's directory made it easy to see what was open. Stage 32 now runs a contests page built as a searchable directory with filters for entry fee, genre and format. That's the right design. On our 24 September 2026 check, though, the page rendered no listings at all, so we can't quote a single contest figure from it. It may simply have been a loading problem; check it yourself before you rule it in or out.
Whichever directory you use, treat it as a map, not a source. Fees, deadlines and caps change every cycle, and two of the contests below closed before their own published final deadlines. The only numbers you should trust are the ones on the contest's own entry page, on the day you pay.
The bigger shift is in how you pick. Without a ranking system translating placements into a common score, a placement is only as legible as the contest's own name. That argues for fewer, better known contests over a scatter of small ones whose results nobody outside the contest will recognise. If you want a wider shortlist than the three we verify here, our roundup of screenwriting contests worth entering is the place to start.
That's the real answer to where to submit screenplays after Coverfly shut down: to programs whose names do the work a ranking used to do.
The Nicholl Fellowships Now Run Through Partners and Two Public Portals
The Academy Nicholl Fellowships changed shape, and the change matters more than any single platform closing. Per the Academy's Nicholl page, the program now partners with university programs, screenwriting labs and filmmaker organizations, who vet and submit scripts. For everyone else, "The Black List and the Writers Guild Foundation will serve as portals for public submissions." All submitted scripts are read and reviewed by Academy members.
Photo by Martin Lopez on Pexels
On June 8, 2026, the Academy announced 55 partners for the 2026/27 cycle, an increase of 15 from the previous year. Up to five Nicholl Fellowships are to be awarded in spring 2027.
The 2026/27 public windows (closed as of September 2026)
- Black List portal: June 8 to July 6, 2026, or until 2,500 entries were received.
- Writers Guild Foundation portal: June 22 to July 20, 2026, or until 2,000 entries were received. The WGF's page listed the fee as "$100 for the first 750 submissions" and "$120 for the remaining submission spots," opening June 22 at 11 am PT with a final deadline of July 20 at 5 pm PT.
Both deadlines have passed, and as of September 2026 no dates for the next cycle have been published anywhere we could find. The official pages we read also didn't state a fellowship prize amount or a separate Black List portal fee, so we're not going to guess at either. For context only: an older No Film School article reported that the Black List forwarded up to 25 scripts to Nicholl readers, which it framed as roughly 1% of entries. That was an earlier cycle and isn't confirmed for 2026/27.
The rules that knock people out
From the 2026/27 rules document, as of September 2026:
- Your total lifetime earnings from film and television writing may not exceed $25,000 USD before the competition ends.
- You must be human and 18 or older.
- The script must be feature length, 80 to 125 pages, original, in English and in standard format.
- Scripts with dialogue, characters or scene description generated by AI are ineligible.
- One screenplay per entrant.
- A script referred by an official partner can never be submitted again. A script entered through a public portal that isn't referred may be entered up to three times in a 10 year period.
- Winners can't enter again.
Two more details worth knowing: the Academy acquires no rights to your entry script or the scripts you write during the fellowship year, and final selection sits with the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Executive Committee.
Plan for the partner route
The 2026/27 public portals closed on July 6 and July 20, 2026, and no next cycle dates exist as of September 2026, so use the gap to find out whether a program you already belong to is one of the 55 partners.
The partner rule cuts both ways. A partner referral is a stronger path in, but it burns that script for Nicholl forever. If a draft isn't ready, the portal's three entries in ten years is the more forgiving door.
Two Established Contests Still Taking Entries Each Year: PAGE and Austin
Both of these run annually, and both are closed for 2026 as of September 2026. Neither has published 2027 fees or deadlines in anything we could find, so the figures below are the 2026 cycle only. Don't budget for 2027 off them.
PAGE International Screenwriting Awards
The 2026 PAGE contest is closed for entries, and winners are scheduled to be announced Thursday, October 15. The 2026 deadline tiers, all at 11
p.m. Pacific, as of September 2026:- Early Entry, Thursday January 15: $49
- Regular Entry, Sunday February 15: $59
- Late Entry, Sunday March 15: $69
- Last Minute, Wednesday April 15: $79
- Final Entry, Friday May 8: $89
Scripts of 30 pages or less took a $5 reduction. Extra categories or judges cost $20 each, up to two. Multiple scripts on one form got a $10 discount per script.
Now the prizes, and this is where you need to read carefully. The 2026 cash prizes, as of September 2026, were a $25,000 Grand Prize, $1,000 for Gold in each category, $500 for Silver and $250 for Bronze. That's the cash.
Everything else is not cash: an InkTip Pro Membership, Stage 32 promotional packages, VPF pitches, gift certificates to Amazon, Office Depot and Starbucks, and free tuition to a Nostos Screenwriting Retreat in Tuscany for the Grand Prize winner. PAGE advertises "over $50,000 in Cash and Prizes," and that headline figure blends the cash with services and gift cards. Only the amounts in the paragraph above are money in your account.
Austin Film Festival Script Competition
Austin's 2026 competition ran five categories: Feature Screenplay, Short Screenplay/Teleplay, Playwriting, Fiction Podcast and Scripted Digital Series. The 2026 fees, as of September 2026:
- Early Bird (3/27/26): Feature $60, Short $50, Play $25, Podcast $40, Digital $45
- Regular (4/24/26): Feature $70, Short $60, Play $25, Podcast $40, Digital $55
- Late (5/27/26): Feature $90, Short $75, Play $35, Podcast $50, Digital $65
The official page now reads: "The 2026 Script Competitions are now closed," and notes that categories reached capacity ahead of the published late deadline. Read that twice. A published deadline is the latest you might get in, not a promise. The page we fetched stated neither 2026 prize amounts nor a winners date, so we won't quote either. Austin also publishes a rules document for the cycle, which is worth reading before you pay next year.
The pattern across both, and across the Nicholl portals, is caps. Entry limits turned three different programs into first come contests. The best screenwriting contests after Coverfly reward writers who have a finished draft in January, not writers still polishing in May.
What a reader at any of these wants is simple: a finished script that looks like it could go out tomorrow. If you want to see what that standard reads like on the page, here's one to open.
ScriptLix
PAID IN LEAD
A finished screenplay with sample pages you can read right now. Notice how fast the opening tells you what kind of story you're in.
Read free sample →What Contests Cost, and the Extras That Raise the Bill
Entry fees look small one at a time. They stop looking small once you stack the timing penalty and the extras on top, and most writers never add them up until the card statement arrives. Here's the arithmetic on the 2026 figures, as of September 2026.
Photo by https://kaboompics.com/ on Pexels
Timing is the biggest lever. At PAGE, the same feature cost $49 on the January tier and $89 on the May tier. At Austin, a feature cost $60 at Early Bird and $90 at Late. Late entry is a tax on unfinished drafts.
Extras compound. At PAGE, feedback was an optional $100 add on that had to be requested at entry and couldn't be added later, and each extra category or judge was $20. A final tier entry with feedback and two extra categories came to $229 for one script.
Hosting runs monthly. On the Black List, an online project is $30 a month, with evaluations reported at $100 each. Forget to switch off auto renewal and a script you've stopped pushing keeps billing.
Nicholl's WGF portal had a price step. $100 for the first 750 entries, $120 after, as of September 2026. Being early saved $20 and, with a 2,000 entry cap, possibly your place.
Early money matters
In PAGE's 2026 cycle one feature cost $49 in January and $89 in May, and $100 feedback could only be added at entry, so the same script could cost anywhere from $49 to $229.
None of this means contests are a bad deal. It means the cheapest improvement to your contest budget is finishing earlier, and the second cheapest is knowing whether the script is ready before you spend anything at all. A reader scoring your first ten pages in a big pile is making a quick call, and you can get a rough read on that call yourself.
Score your own logline or opening page for free before you pay a single entry fee.
Free coverage
How would your script score?
Paste a scene or upload your draft. You get a 1 to 100 score, what is working, and the first thing to fix, in about twenty seconds. No account.
Or upload your full draftHow Producers Should Read a Placement in a World Without Coverfly
For a few years, a placement came with context. A manager could see where it sat on the Red List, how it compared with other placements, and whether the writer was climbing. That context is gone. Now a placement arrives as a line in a query or a logline pitch, and the reader has to decide what it's worth on the contest's name alone.
If you're on the buying side, that means doing a little more of the ranking in your head. Which contest, which year, which round, and in which category. A quarterfinal in a crowded feature category and a win in a small one aren't the same signal, and nothing converts them into a common score anymore. We also know of no published data on how often placements lead to sales or representation, so anyone quoting you a conversion rate is guessing.
If you're the writer, make that job easy. State the placement precisely: contest, year, round, category. Don't round up a quarterfinal into "award winning." Keep a simple document of every placement with a link to the contest's own results page, since the profile that used to hold all of it no longer exists.
“A placement is a reason to open the file, never a substitute for what's inside it.”
— Spec Market Reality
The discovery side has fragmented too. With contest ranking platforms gone, writers now piece together feedback and discovery from separate places, and ScriptLix's free AI coverage is one quick way to score a draft from 1 to 100 before it goes anywhere. Hosting services, contest results, fellowship referrals and direct listings now sit side by side, and none of them does everything Coverfly bundled together.
That's the whole picture of the coverfly shutdown for screenwriting contests: the scoreboard is gone, the contests aren't. The Nicholl still reads every script it receives. PAGE and Austin still run every year. The Black List still hosts. What changed is that no single profile tells your story for you.
So before the next cycle opens, check your script is contest ready: within the page count the contest requires, in standard format, entirely your own writing, and finished well before the early tier closes. Then enter early, enter where the name carries weight, and keep the receipts.