Frequently Asked Questions

ClearTerm checks English client MSAs and services agreements for software freelancers. You upload a PDF (or paste the text) and it returns three headline calls — work-for-hire / reusable code, when you get paid, and whether indemnity is uncapped — plus a safety score, plain-English findings across payment, IP, liability and termination, and wording you can paste back. Diff Mode compares a revised draft.

ClearTerm extracts the text from your PDF server-side (or uses pasted text), then sends it to Google Gemini with a prompt that reviews it from the freelancer's side. It prioritises work-for-hire / IP assignment, Net-60+ payment terms, and uncapped indemnity, and still checks liability and termination. Each finding gets a severity; the safety score deducts from 100 based on those severities. The method is written up in full on the How It Works page.

No, it cannot replace a lawyer, and you should not treat it as one. ClearTerm is designed to surface common, well-understood contract risk patterns, but it is an AI system: it can miss issues, misread unusual drafting, and occasionally flag something that is fine in context. We do not publish an accuracy figure because we have not measured one. Treat the output as a starting point for a conversation — with your client, or with a qualified lawyer for anything high-stakes.

No. ClearTerm is not a law firm, is not a substitute for professional legal advice, and no lawyer-client relationship is created by using it. It is a tool for understanding a document and deciding what to ask about.

ClearTerm does not intentionally store your raw PDF files in its own app storage. Contract content is processed transiently to produce the analysis, and Google Gemini API handling still follows Google's current API terms and project settings. Only minimal analysis results are saved when you choose features like account history.

Uploaded PDFs and the text extracted from them are not retained in ClearTerm's own storage — they are processed in memory to produce the analysis and not written to our database or file storage. What we do keep: your account record, until you delete it; analyses you explicitly save to your archive, until you delete them or your account; billing metadata from Stripe, for as long as tax and accounting rules require; the scan-pack grant ledger (Checkout Session id + user id, no card data) indefinitely for payment integrity; admin action audit logs indefinitely (identifiers anonymized after account deletion); product-funnel event names (for example landing_view) with no identifiers or document content, for about 90 days; in-flight analysis markers (uid / IP / anonymous id, no contract content) for about 14 days and purged on account deletion when present; and other operational records with no contract content — scan telemetry and Stripe webhook event leases for about 90 days, abuse-prevention counters for about 60 days, login codes for about 10 minutes. Expiry is enforced automatically and usually completes within about a day of the deadline. Contract text is still sent to Google Gemini to produce the analysis, and Google's own logging and retention follow their current API terms and the settings configured for the project.

Open your profile and use Delete Account. That removes your account and the analyses saved to it. You can also export a copy of your data from the same screen first. Deletion is immediate for your account record; operational records that reference it expire on their own schedule, described above.

ClearTerm is tuned for software freelancers reviewing English client agreements: services agreements, statements of work, MSAs, independent contractor agreements, and NDAs attached to those deals. The risk framing assumes you are the contractor, with work-for-hire, payment windows, and indemnity as the headline checks.

PDFs with selectable text, up to 4 MB and 40 pages, or paste the contract text. Those limits apply to the file. The analysis itself reads up to 100,000 characters of extracted text — roughly 30-40 pages of contract prose — whether you scan with no account, a free account, or a paid scan pack. A longer document is rejected by default rather than silently truncated; you can confirm analysing only the first portion, or paste a shorter excerpt. Scanned or photographed contracts will not work as PDFs — ClearTerm reads the text layer and does not run OCR — so use Paste Text for those.

Shield Mode reviews a single contract and flags risks across the whole agreement. Diff Mode takes two PDFs — an original and a revision — finds what actually changed between them, and tells you whether each edit increases or reduces your risk. Diff Mode is the faster way to check a redline you have been sent back.

1 scan a month with no account, 5 on a free account. Anonymous results are shown in full in this browser tab; ClearTerm does not store them on our servers for you to claim after signup. Archive and history remain pack-only. A one-time $9 pack buys 20 scans with archive access and composed negotiation emails.

Analysis stops until the limit resets at the start of the next calendar month, and ClearTerm tells you which limit you hit. Nothing is charged automatically and no scan is queued. You can buy a $9 20-scan pack for more credits with archive and composed emails.

The recurring ones for software freelancers are: work-for-hire or broad IP assignment that takes reusable libraries and tools, payment terms of Net 60 or longer with no deposit, uncapped indemnity, unlimited revisions, one-sided termination, and automatic renewal with no notice window. ClearTerm puts the first three on the results screen and checks for the rest.

Yes. Every risk it finds comes with a ready-to-copy negotiation snippet you can paste into an email, on every plan. A scan pack adds a composed email covering the whole contract at once, with a choice of casual, professional or formal tone and room to add your own context about the client.

The free monthly allowance resets at the start of each calendar month and unused free scans do not carry forward. One-time pack credits are different: they remain until you use them or the pack window ends (about a year from purchase).

One. Comparing two versions of a contract counts as a single scan against your monthly allowance, even though you upload two files.

The scan pack is a one-time purchase — there is no subscription to cancel. Credits remain until you use them or the pack window ends. For billing questions or refunds, email us from the contact page.

If something went wrong — for example a failed analysis you were charged for — email us and we will sort it out. The scan pack is a one-time purchase, so there is no recurring charge to reverse. There is no automatic refund flow, so contact us directly.

Prices are listed as shown at checkout. ClearTerm does not currently enable Stripe Automatic Tax, so VAT or other sales tax is not auto-applied by country at payment. If tax rules apply to your purchase, they are handled outside automatic checkout tax calculation.