Skip to content

Facing a letter, bill, or contract you can't make sense of? Plainsight reads it with you — and helps you decide what to do. Free.

Start

How it stays honest

The integrity isn't a promise. It's the design.

A tool this powerful has one real enemy: capture — slowly becoming owned by, or bent toward, the powerful interests it was built to counterbalance. So Plainsight's defenses are structural, not based on trusting anyone's character. Here's how we keep it on your side.

The Firewall

Money can keep the lights on. It can never reach the answer.

Diagram: money and power on the left, an enforced firewall in the center, and what the tool tells you on the right. The two sides never touch.

Money & power

  • Advertisers
  • Partners & referrers
  • The institutions we explain
  • Investors

May help fund the tool. May never touch your answer.

The Firewall

What the tool tells you

  • The plain reading
  • The red flags — even unasked
  • Your options, never ranked for profit
  • Identical for every person

The same whether you're broke or wealthy, paying or free.

The governing rules

The Two Laws

Law 1 — The Firewall

Money may change who can do more with the tool. It may never change what the tool tells you.

The analysis you receive is identical whether you're broke or wealthy, paying or free, signed in or anonymous. No paying party — advertiser, partner, institution, investor — can influence the content of an answer, the ranking of your options, or the direction of a recommendation.

Law 2 — The Direction of Flow

Intelligence flows toward the weak side and the public. Never toward the strong side of your interest.

Aggregate insight is valuable, and we'll use it — but only one way. “Where lease clauses violate local code” → to tenant unions and regulators: allowed. “Which tenants won't fight back” → to landlords: forbidden. Same data. The direction of the flow is the entire test.

The lines it won't cross

What Plainsight will never be

Ad-supported. The advertiser becomes the customer, and answers quietly bend toward them.
Funded by referral fees. We will never be paid to steer you somewhere. That's exactly how today's “free” legal, loan, and insurance sites are quietly bought.
A seller of your data. Not to anyone, ever — least of all to the people on the other side of your situation.
Paid by the institutions we explain. No company can pay for a softer reading of its own documents.
Optimized for engagement. Success is you understanding your situation and leaving to act on it — not time-on-site.

How it stays durable

How it's allowed to earn money

To stay independent, Plainsight has to be durable. Every revenue model passes one test: it may change who can do more with the tool, never what the tool tells you. Money may come from four places — and only these four:

The action, never the answer. Understanding your situation is free forever. Help executing — drafting the appeal or dispute letter — can be paid, at a flat fee no matter which option you pick, so we're never tempted to steer you.
Mission-aligned institutions. Legal aid, libraries, unions, clinics, and city agencies pay to deploy Plainsight so it multiplies their tiny staff. Their incentive is our mission.
Workflow for professionals. Caseworkers and advocates pay for bulk tools and dashboards — convenience, never better truth. Your free answer is exactly as complete as theirs.
Vigilance over time. Watchdog alerts — “tell me when a bill affecting renters moves,” “remind me this deadline is near.” You pay for vigilance, not for answers.

The honest tradeoff: clean revenue scales slower than ads or referral fees. That gap is why most well-meaning versions of this idea cave. We accept the slower path on purpose — it's the price of the tool actually being what it claims to be.

Made structural, not promised

The architecture behind the promise

Two entities, one firewall

Plainsight is designed so that a mission-locked foundation owns the free core, the brand, and the analysis engine's governing rules, while a separate public-benefit arm can build paid tools on top of the core but can never alter the answer you receive. (The entities are being formed; this describes the structure we are building toward.)

Open and auditable

The instructions the engine follows and the exact shape of every answer are written as fixed, explicit rules — not hidden weights — and we are committed to publishing them so you can inspect exactly how the tool is told to reason, including its required “cost of doing nothing” and “when to get a human” honesty fields.

A kill-switch against capture

Plainsight is being built so that if anyone whose interests oppose users tries to take control, the license to the core terminates and reverts to independent stewardship — and so that if Plainsight ever can't operate without breaking these principles, it shuts the product down rather than continue in compromised form. (These clauses live in the governing documents once the entity is formed.)

Honest about its limits

Plainsight is an ally and a translator — not a lawyer or a doctor. It explains what documents say and what options exist, and it will always tell you when your situation is beyond a tool and point you to real human help. It does not provide licensed professional advice.

Translate a document — free