Pricing
This is the whole pricing argument and it is unusual enough to state before any number: anchoring, the unsupported marking, translation, the editor, unlimited saved summaries and Markdown export are all in the free version, with no caps and no trial clock. The only difference between the tiers is whose API key runs the model.
$0forever, on your own API key
The complete product. You choose a provider, paste a key, and your page text goes from your browser straight to them — never through us.
Everything in Free — which is everything — with the setup step removed. Install it and it works.
Line by line
Published in full because a table with one difference in it is more convincing than a paragraph claiming there is one difference.
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Whose API key runs the model | Yours | Ours |
| Claims anchored to verbatim sentences | Yes | Yes |
| Unsupported marking | Always on | Always on |
| Jump to the source sentence in the page | Yes | Yes |
| Translation | Yes | Yes |
| Social editor | Yes | Yes |
| Saved summaries | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Markdown export | Yes | Yes |
| Summaries per day | Your provider’s limits | No daily cap, subject to an abuse ceiling |
| Provider and model controls | Shown | Hidden — there is nothing to configure |
| Who receives your page text | Only the provider you chose | Briefly’s server, with no identifier attached |
| Setup before first use | About two minutes, once | None |
| Cost of a summary | Free tier, or a fraction of a cent | Included |
Written out here rather than buried in a checkout footer, so nothing about the purchase is a surprise afterwards.
Briefly Pro is sold and invoiced by Freemius, Inc., our reseller and Merchant of Record. They take the payment, handle sales tax and VAT for your country, and issue your invoice. Their name is what appears on your statement.
The purchase happens on Freemius’s own checkout page, in an ordinary browser tab. No card number, billing address or email address passes through the extension — there is no code in it that could receive one, and no secret key in the package that could act on your account.
After paying you receive a key by email. Open Briefly’s settings, paste it into the licence panel, and Pro is on. There is no sign-up, no password and nothing to recover. Chrome asks permission for that one request at the moment you submit the key.
Activating Pro also removes the provider and model controls from Settings, because there is no longer anything for you to configure. Your own key, if you had one, is yours to remove or leave in place.
A licence covers one installation at a time. Removing the licence in Briefly hands the seat back before it forgets your key, so the next machine can take it; you can also release one from users.freemius.com. If every seat is in use, Briefly says so in those words rather than claiming your key is invalid.
Monthly and yearly renew until you cancel, from the account link in your purchase email. Cancelling stops the next charge; Pro keeps working until the period you have already paid for ends. Lifetime never renews, so there is nothing to cancel.
When a Pro licence lapses, nothing you saved is deleted. The install returns to the free tier, where every feature still works — it simply needs an API key of your own again.
Every paid purchase is covered by WaaFaa’s 7-day money-back guarantee: request a refund within 7 days of any charge, for any reason, with no conditions. It applies to monthly, yearly and lifetime purchases, and to renewal charges.
Email us from the address you paid with, or request it from your Freemius account. Refunds are processed by Freemius and returned to your original payment method.
Briefly’s Pro tier cannot be granted to yourself by editing your own browser storage, and the reason is worth stating because it is unusual: the thing you are buying is a request our server makes on our API key. An install claiming Pro without a licence Freemius validated gets a refusal from the server, not a summary. There is no client-side flag to flip.
The other half of that arrangement is the part we would rather you heard from us. On Pro, your page text does reach Briefly’s server, because that is where the model call is made from. It travels with no identifier of you attached — the request that proves your tier and the request that carries your reading are two separate calls, and the second one carries a short-lived opaque token that records a tier and an expiry and nothing else. The server is structurally incapable of learning who read what.
It is still a better privacy position to stay on the free tier, where the text never reaches us at all. We are not going to pretend otherwise to sell a subscription. It is all in the privacy policy.
Briefly