Hi, I’m Peter Tanham
I’m a software engineer based in Dublin, Ireland, and the solo founder of IndexStudio. I run the product, write the code, answer the support email, and ship the changes. There’s no team behind a chatbot — if you write to [email protected], you’re writing to me. You can also find me on petertanham.com and LinkedIn.
Why IndexStudio exists
I built IndexStudio because I was writing my own book.
When I got near the end — manuscript finished, typesetting underway — I went looking for an easy way to add a back-of-book index. There wasn’t one. The professional indexing software (Cindex, SKY Index, MACREX) was expensive, desktop-only, and clearly built for full-time indexers who’d already invested years learning it. The free option — Word’s auto-generated word list — was almost useless: an alphabetical dump with no structure, no context, no cross-references, and entries no reader would actually look up.
The realistic options for a self-publishing author were: pay $800–$2,000 for a professional indexer (and wait weeks), spend a weekend learning Cindex and a few more days indexing by hand, or just publish the book without an index. Most self-publishers pick the third option. Their books ship with no way for a reader to flip to the back and find the chapter where a particular concept is discussed.
That seemed like the wrong outcome. Indie authors aren’t shipping fewer books — they’re shipping more, and most of them never have an index. Behind every one of those books is a reader who reaches the end, flips to where the index should be, finds nothing, and gives up looking. There are thousands of self-publishers in that situation, and hundreds of thousands of their readers.
IndexStudio uses large language models to do what a good indexer does: read the whole document, identify the concepts that actually matter, group every place each concept appears, and produce a structured, contextual index that’s ready to drop into the final book. It does in minutes what previously took a weekend of manual work or weeks of waiting on a contractor.
Who it’s for — and who it isn’t
For a 600-page reference work, a research monograph, or a legal text where index quality is part of the publication standard, you should still hire a professional human indexer — a great index is a craft, and the best ones are written by people who have done thousands of them.
IndexStudio is for everyone else: the self-published non-fiction author, the academic with a conference paper, the small-press cookbook, the technical manual that needs a real index but doesn’t have a $1,500 budget for one. The output is editable down to the last entry — you can merge terms, add subentries, fix what the AI got wrong, and export when you’re happy.
How I work on it
IndexStudio is a real product with real customers, but it’s not a venture-funded company. That means I can prioritize things that matter to actual users (export quality, accuracy, edit ergonomics) over things that matter to investors (growth charts, feature counts). Bug reports and feature requests go straight to me, and I usually answer within a day.
Get in touch
If you have feedback, questions, or a tricky document you’d like to test it on:
- Email: [email protected]
- Contact form: /contact
- Mailing address: 13 Upper Baggot Street, Dublin 4, Ireland