Briefly
Either it quotes the page
A supported claim carries the sentence it came from, word for word, and clicking it scrolls the real page to that sentence and paints a highlight over it. You are checking the source, not a second summary of it.
Chrome extension · Free · No sign-up
Every claim quotes the sentence it came from.
Briefly summarizes the article you’re reading into short claims. Click any claim to see the exact sentence it came from. Anything it can’t trace back is marked Unsupported — not hidden, not dropped.
- No account
- No site access at install
- Every feature free
Briefly
journal.example.com/sleep-reaction-time
What Briefly says
What the page says
Participants who slept fewer than six hours showed a 14% slower mean reaction time the following morning.
The effect held across all four cohorts, including the group that reported feeling well rested.
Caffeine intake was not measured, which the authors list as the study’s main limitation.
Nothing in this page says anything about long-term decline. That is why the third claim carries a mark instead of a quote.
The one rule
There is no third state
Every summariser writes confident sentences. The one you cannot catch is the confident sentence the article never supported — catching it would mean reading the article, which is the thing you were trying to avoid. So Briefly makes a narrower promise, and one you can check in ten seconds.
Or it is marked Unsupported
If the sentence the model cited is not in the page, the claim stays on screen carrying the word Unsupported, an icon, a solid edge and a tinted ground — four ways to read the same fact, so removing any three still leaves it legible.
And nothing in between
No “partially supported”, no paraphrase that counts as a quote, no quietly dropping the ones that failed so the list looks clean. A summary with the failures removed is a summary that lies by omission.
The checking happens on your machine
Briefly compares each cited sentence against the text your own browser extracted — the model is never asked whether it was right. So a claim produced on a cheap open-weights model carries exactly the same proof as one produced on the most expensive model in the list. A weaker model gives you fewer supported claims. It cannot give you one that looks supported and is not.
It is not a fact check
Worth being exact about: Briefly verifies that the quoted sentence is genuinely in the page. It does not verify that the page is telling the truth. If an article is wrong, a faithful summary of it is wrong too — what Briefly removes is the layer of error the summariser adds on top.
One click, four steps
Nothing happens until you ask for it
Briefly has no content script and no background activity. Until you click the icon it is not running on the page you are reading — there is nothing to switch off, because nothing was on.
You click the icon
That click is what grants access to the tab, for that tab, at that moment. Chrome
calls this activeTab, and it is why Briefly asks for
no site access when you install it.
It reads the article
The page text is extracted locally. If there is no readable article, or the page is short enough to simply read, Briefly says so and stops there — a correct outcome that costs nothing.
It asks the model
The article text goes to the model and comes back as a list of claims, each carrying the sentence it was drawn from. This is the only network request Briefly makes — and the screen names the recipient before it happens, because it depends on whether you are using our key or one of your own.
It checks every one
Each cited sentence is matched against the text your browser extracted. Found is Supported. Not found is Unsupported, on screen, with the reason. Then you read three claims instead of three thousand words.
Or bring your own key
Free to start. Yours to take over.
Most summarisers are free because you are paying in some other currency. Briefly gives you a few summaries a day on our key so you can see it work — then, if you want more, you add a key of your own. That removes the limit entirely, and it takes Briefly’s server out of the path: your page text goes from your browser straight to the provider you picked, under your own agreement with them.
484models to choose from
13providers
6with a usable free tier
1key, if you pick an aggregator
The one most people already have a key for.
Free tierGPT models, billed to your own OpenAI account.
Claude models, on your Anthropic console key.
One key, nearly every model on this page. Several cost nothing.
Free tierThe fastest option here, with a generous free rate limit.
Free tierVery cheap per summary, billed to your own balance.
European hosting, with a free experiment tier.
Free tierGrok models on an xAI console key.
Open-weights models, very fast, daily free allowance.
Free tierA broad open-weights catalogue on one key.
Hosted open models with routed endpoints.
The long tail of open-weights models, cheaply.
Open models with an hourly and daily free allowance.
Free tierThe model field takes anything you type and sends it as written, so a model released after this build still works.
One free tier comes with a condition worth reading. Google trains on
prompts submitted to the free Gemini tier. For a tool pointed at whatever you happen
to be reading, that is a disclosure rather than a footnote — Briefly says so in
the provider list itself, and the
setup guide explains what to do about it.
Optional, once
Want no limit? A key takes two minutes
Briefly works without this. But if you run out of the daily allowance on our key, pick a provider, open their keys page, copy the key, paste it into Briefly’s Settings and tick the box. The setup guide walks through it provider by provider, including which ones cost nothing and what every error message means.
What leaves the browser
You can check every one of these before you trust us
Privacy claims are worth exactly as much as the reader’s ability to test them. Each of these is visible from Chrome’s own dialogs or its Network panel, with no need to take anybody’s word for it.
No site access at install
Briefly declares no host permissions, so Chrome shows no “read your data on all websites” warning when you add it. Access to a provider is requested one at a time, in the click where you configure it, and you can withdraw it from Chrome’s own extension settings. Check it in the install dialog.
No request before you click
There is no content script and no background polling. Open the Network panel, browse for an hour, and Briefly appears in it zero times until the moment you use it. Check it in the Network panel.
Your key goes to your vendor only
On the free tier there is exactly one recipient and it is the provider you chose. Your key is never sent to Briefly, and Briefly’s server is never in the path of your page text. Check it in the Network panel.
The consent screen names the real recipient
Before the first summary, Briefly tells you who is about to receive the text — by name, the provider you actually configured, not a generic “third-party AI service”. Consent to send your reading to an unnamed party is not consent. Check it on first use.
Two outcomes send nothing at all. If the page has no readable
article, or is short enough that reading it is faster than summarising it, Briefly
tells you so and stops. Both say “Nothing was sent” on screen — the
privacy claim being true in a case you can watch happen.
By decision, not by omission
Six things it will not do
Each of these would make some screen look better and some number go up. They are listed here so that if one of them ever appears, you know it was a change of position rather than a feature.
Hide a claim it could not verify
Dropping the failures would make every summary look clean. It would also make the mark meaningless, because you could no longer tell a careful summary from a filtered one.
Summarise part of a long document silently
When an article is too long to send whole, Briefly says which share of it the summary covers. Presenting the first third as the whole would be a false claim about the document, made by us rather than by the model.
Run in the background
No content script, no pre-fetching the page you are “probably about to” summarise. Anything that reads ahead to feel fast is reading pages you never asked about.
Collect analytics or track browsing
There is no event pipeline, no session recording and no list of what you have read. It costs us the product analytics everybody else has, and that is the trade.
Send an identifier alongside your page text
On Pro, the request that carries page text carries no account identifier, and the one that identifies your licence carries no page text. They are separate requests on purpose, so neither can be joined to the other.
Keep a quote attached to words you edited
Rewrite a claim in the editor and its source quote is removed automatically. A real sentence from the article underneath text that no longer says what the article said is the most convincing way to be wrong.
What the money buys
Pro sells one thing, and it is not features
Every feature is in the free version, with no limits — the anchoring, the unsupported marking, translation, the editor, unlimited saved summaries and export. None of it sits behind the price. The single difference is whose API key runs the model.
Free
The complete product, working the moment you install it. Nothing is held back and nothing expires.
$0nothing to set up
- Every feature — no trial clock, no locked tab
- A few summaries a day on our key, no account needed
- Add your own key for no limit — 484 models across 13 providers
- On your own key, your text never passes through us
We run the model for you
Everything in Free — which is everything — with the setup step removed. Pick whichever way of paying suits you.
Monthly
$5
every month
Yearly
$45
every year · save 25%
Lifetime
$100
once · never renews
- No key to obtain, paste or keep topped up
- No usage bill of your own to read
- No provider to pick, now or when one is retired
- One device at a time, and moving it takes one click
If managing an API key does not bother you, stay on the free version.
It is the whole product. Pro exists for people who would rather not think about
providers, balances and rate limits — and saying so costs us some sales and
prevents every refund that begins “I thought Pro had more in it.”
Straight answers
Frequently asked questions
What does “verified” actually mean?
It means the sentence the claim is built on is genuinely in the page, word for word. Briefly finds that sentence in the text your browser extracted, and clicking the claim scrolls to it.
It does not mean the claim is true in the world. Briefly checks the summary against the article; it does not check the article against reality.
Do I need my own API key?
Not to start. Install Briefly and it works — you get a few summaries a day on our key, with no account and nothing to configure.
That allowance is small, because running the model costs real money and we are covering it. When you reach it, Briefly shows you how to add a key of your own. Several providers give one away free, and from then on there is no limit.
A key of your own has a second effect that is arguably the bigger one: the page text stops passing through Briefly’s server entirely and goes straight from your browser to the provider you chose, under your own agreement with them.
Which provider should I pick if I want to spend nothing?
Groq is the usual answer — free, fast, and a generous rate limit. OpenRouter is the other good one, because a single key reaches nearly every model in the list and several are free.
Google’s free tier also works, with one condition worth knowing about first: see choosing a provider in the setup guide.
What does one summary cost?
On a free tier, nothing. On a paid one it is a fraction of a cent for a typical article on the cheap fast models Briefly recommends — the exact figure is your provider’s price list, and Briefly shows each model’s input and output price beside its name when you pick one.
Cheap and fast is genuinely the right choice here. The checking is done by your own machine, not by the model, so paying for a larger model buys better writing rather than better verification.
Does Briefly see the pages I read?
On the free tier, no — there is one request and it goes to the provider you configured. On Pro, the request carrying your page text carries no identifier of you, and the request that identifies your licence carries no page text.
Either way there is no analytics, no browsing history and no list of what you have summarised anywhere but your own device.
What happens on a page that is not an article?
Briefly says there is no readable article, and sends nothing. Same for a page short enough that reading it is quicker than summarising it — it tells you the word count and stops.
Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer is not an HTML document, so it comes back as no readable article too.
Can I use a model that is not in the list?
Yes. The model field is free text and sends whatever you type, so a model released after this version of Briefly still works. The list is there to help you find one, not to decide which may run.
One requirement: the model has to support structured JSON output. Briefly asks for a JSON object of claims, and a model that answers in prose gives nothing usable. That is why the built-in list only contains models that promise it.
How do I remove my key, or stop Briefly reaching the network?
Settings has a control that removes the stored key and withdraws the host permission in the same click. Chrome’s own extension settings will also revoke site access at any time, without uninstalling anything.
Your saved summaries are not touched by either, and stay on your device until you clear them.
Feedback
Tell us what would make Briefly better.
A provider you would like added, a summary that did not read the way you expected, or something that could simply work more neatly — send it over. It goes straight to the person building this.