Plainly takes text that's dense, formal, or hard to parse — a lease, an insurance policy, a form, an employment contract, anything — and rewrites it in plain English, shown side by side with the original so you can check the rewrite against the real wording. Nothing it produces is legal, financial, or professional advice; it's a reading aid, built to help you get through something dense faster and with more confidence about what it actually says.
Plainly has three ways to do the actual rewriting, and they work genuinely differently under the hood — this isn't three price tiers of the same thing.
No network call, no AI model, nothing sent anywhere. It's a straightforward two-step pass: a glossary of common dense/formal phrases gets swapped for plainer equivalents, and sentences that run long get split at a natural break.
Honest tradeoff: it's mechanical, not a model reading for meaning, so unusual or very dense wording can come out rougher than the paid tier. That's a deliberate choice, not a bug to quietly fix — the free tier stays free because it costs nothing to run.
You don't need a Claude or Anthropic account for this. Sharper uses Plainly's own connection to Anthropic behind the scenes — you just subscribe to Plainly ($6/mo, 7-day free trial) and paste your text; there's nothing to sign up for, nowhere else to log in, no separate bill. Your text is sent securely to Plainly's server, which calls Anthropic's Claude model to produce the rewrite, and returns it to you — it isn't stored afterward. This is a genuine model reading the text for meaning, not a glossary swap, so it handles ambiguity, unusual structure, and dense legal/technical wording much better than the free tier.
For anyone who'd rather not go through Plainly's server at all: paste in your own Anthropic API key (from console.anthropic.com) and your text goes directly from your browser to Anthropic, never touching Plainly's infrastructure. Same underlying model as Sharper, billed directly to your own Anthropic account instead of a Plainly subscription.
Everything you explain gets saved to a personal library on your device (IndexedDB, not a server — see Privacy below). When you explain a new document, Plainly compares it against everything already in your library: it scores paragraphs by shared meaningful words (skipping short/common ones) and surfaces the closest matches from other documents you've saved. Paste your lease and your insurance policy, and a clause that shows up in both will cross-reference automatically — useful for catching the same obligation phrased two different ways across documents you're juggling at once.
Full detail: Privacy Policy · Terms of Service.