Cruxly: What It Does, What It Costs, and How It Compares
One subscription for video and documents, and a contract broken down clause by clause. Here's the full picture, with pricing and numbers.
There are plenty of tools for video and for documents, and nearly all of them cover one or the other: either YouTube clips or PDFs. Cruxly covers both on one subscription, with a shared quota and a shared chat. Below is the full breakdown: what the service does, what it costs, how it differs from the tools it's usually compared against, and how to check all of it on your own file in two minutes without an account.
Cruxly in one paragraph
We do two things, and we do them in one place. Give us a YouTube link or upload a PDF and you get a structured breakdown: an overview, a section split, key points and figures. A chat opens next to it that finds answers in your source text rather than in the model's general knowledge. Video also gets a full verbatim transcript, and contracts get a dedicated mode that works through the document clause by clause. All of it is one subscription and one quota, not two services with two invoices.
Pricing, all of it
Guest, no account: free, one breakdown a day. Study plan: free after registration, three breakdowns a day, results saved. Pro: ₽399 a month, billed monthly with no annual plan, unlimited breakdowns. Everything is included in the subscription with no charge for individual features: hitting the daily limit doesn't cost extra, it simply resets tomorrow. You can cancel at any point.
What the free plan gives you
Study is free permanently, not a one-week trial. Three breakdowns a day, files up to 15 MB, video up to 120 minutes, four chat questions per breakdown, and saved results in your account. That's enough to work through a lecture a day during exam season, or to handle work documents as they arrive. Guest access exists for something else: testing the service on your own real file before handing over an email. One breakdown a day, files up to 5 MB, two chat questions.
What Pro adds
Pro removes the daily cap on breakdowns and the cap on chat questions, raises files to 300 MB and video to 420 minutes (seven hours), and unlocks export to PDF, DOCX, and Markdown. If video and documents are daily work rather than an occasional errand, it pays for itself in the first week: one subscription covers lectures and calls as well as contracts and reports. Testing a single file costs nothing on guest access, a semester or a busy quarter fits inside Study, and Pro is for when documents stop being occasional.
Full breakdown of plans and limits
Cruxly and ChatPDF
ChatPDF made the category recognizable, and it's what we get compared to most. The clearest difference is scope: ChatPDF handles documents, while Cruxly also handles YouTube video, produces transcripts, and keeps one chat and one quota across all of it. If you only work with PDFs, compare on breakdown quality and check each service's current pricing directly, since numbers like this change often. If your work involves both clips and documents, the choice is between one subscription and two. ChatPDF doesn't handle video at all: no transcription, no chat about a clip, since documents are the whole product.
The full Cruxly vs ChatPDF comparison
Cruxly and Eightify
Eightify is a well-known browser extension for breaking down YouTube clips, and that's its only job. Cruxly handles YouTube the same way and adds a verbatim transcript, a chat grounded in the clip's content, and PDF work up to a full contract-review mode, all on one subscription. Eightify itself doesn't touch documents at all: it's a browser extension built for one format.
The full Cruxly vs Eightify comparison
Cruxly and AI aggregators
Smartbuddy, BotHub, and similar services sell access to models: you top up a balance and pay per token or in packages of an internal currency, picking models yourself. That's a different category. There you get access to a model and then work out how to reach a result. BotHub works the same way, selling packages of an internal currency called Caps rather than a flat plan. We give you a finished pipeline for a specific job: pull captions, run speech recognition when there are none, build a search index over the document, assemble a breakdown at the depth you asked for, and keep a chat grounded in the source text. The difference is a toolbox versus a solved problem.
The full Cruxly vs Smartbuddy comparison
Cruxly and NotebookLM
NotebookLM solves the research-notebook problem: gather many sources in one place and work across the stack. It's also no longer a standalone product: it now ships as part of Google's AI subscription tiers rather than being sold on its own. Cruxly goes deep on one item: one clip or one document, broken down thoroughly, with search over the source text and a verbatim transcript when it's video. Neither the verbatim transcript nor the clause-by-clause contract mode is part of what a research notebook is built to do.
A market roundup: which tools specialize in one format, and which cover several at once
Video and documents on one subscription
This is why the service is built the way it is. A student has a YouTube lecture and a PDF textbook. An analyst has a call recording and an annual report. A journalist has an interview and a press release. In all three the material arrives in pairs, and keeping two subscriptions across two services for that is inconvenient and costs more. We give you a shared quota, a shared chat, and one interface for both formats.
The chat finds answers in your file
After the breakdown we build a search index over the document, and the chat searches by meaning, not exact wording. The practical result: a query about "termination" finds the clause about "discharge of obligations" even though not one word matched. Ordinary document search can't do that. It compares characters. The same search pulls from opposite ends of a long document in one answer, so a question about the executive summary can surface a footnote three sections later without you knowing it was there.
Transcription, when you need exact words
For video we return not just a summary but the full verbatim text, word for word. That's what you need when the exact wording matters: a quote for an article, subtitles for a clip, a record of a call. If a video has no captions, we recognize the speech from the audio track. Translation across 12 languages works in both directions.
Contracts get a clause-by-clause breakdown
This is the part general-purpose summarizers don't have. Normal analysis selects what matters from a document. For a contract we switch on a dedicated mode built the opposite way: it extracts every clause and every obligation with no filtering by importance. Each extracted clause carries the verbatim text from the document, a plain-language restatement, a category (obligation, right, payment, termination, penalty, confidentiality, governing law, dispute resolution), and a severity marker. You switch it on with the "This is a legal document" checkbox in the analysis settings.
The complete guide to AI contract analysis
Exporting the result
A finished breakdown exports to PDF, DOCX, and Markdown on Pro. Markdown suits notes and wikis, DOCX suits anything edited by hand afterwards, PDF suits forwarding as-is.
What happens to your files
An unsaved breakdown, its search index, and its chat history are deleted automatically after 24 hours. A saved one sits in your account until you delete it. The same handling applies whether the file is a routine report or something more sensitive, a financial statement, an internal memo. The sane rule regardless of which service you use: don't upload anything under a real NDA anywhere, this one included. Full details on data handling are in the privacy policy.
Students and postgrads
A semester means a stack of YouTube lectures and a stack of PDF textbooks, usually both for the same course. One subscription, one shared quota, and a free Study plan mean testing it costs nothing before exam season gets busy: three breakdowns a day, whichever format lands in front of you next.
Lawyers
A contract broken down clause by clause, the verbatim wording, a plain-language restatement, and a category next to a severity marker are quicker to work from than reading the whole thing cold. The chat pulls up a specific clause by what it's about rather than what it's called, which matters when the same obligation shows up phrased three different ways across a long agreement.
Analysts
A hundred-page report goes in whole, nothing cut out, so a question about the executive summary can pull in a footnote three sections later that changes how a number should be read. Comparing quarterly figures or reconciling two sections that quote the same metric differently is a chat question, not an afternoon of flipping pages.
Journalists
A recorded interview needs the exact words for a quote, not a paraphrase, and transcription returns the full verbatim text, word for word. A press release or a source document gets the same document-chat treatment as anything else: ask for the one line that matters instead of rereading the whole release.
Marketers and product managers
A competitor's product video and a long spec document turn into the same kind of breakdown: the gist in two minutes, the exact wording in chat when a specific claim or requirement needs checking. Three competitor demos read faster as three summaries side by side than as three videos watched in full.
Consultants and freelancers
Client work rarely arrives in one format. A discovery call recording, a scope document, a competitor's webinar, a signed statement of work, all for the same engagement, all needing to be read fast between other clients. One subscription and one quota mean the format of the file stops being a decision about which tool to open.
Free that stays free
A lot of "free" plans in this category are trial periods with a countdown, or a permanently free tier stripped down into a teaser for the real product. Study isn't either: three breakdowns a day, files up to 15 MB, four chat questions per breakdown, and saved results, indefinitely, with no expiration date and no feature crippled to push an upgrade. Everything that makes the analysis and the chat actually useful is already there on Study. Pro adds only export and lifts the daily cap on top of that.
Trying it without leaving what you already use
Switching services isn't a one-time decision made from a comparison page, it's usually tested side by side first. Guest access exists for exactly that: no account, no card, one document or video a day, two chat questions. Running the same file through Cruxly that already went through another tool is the fastest way to see whether the breakdown, the chat, or the extra formats change anything for the actual work in front of you.
A more detailed look under the hood
How the chat actually works, what happens to a file technically, and why legal mode only switches on manually: covered in more depth in a separate, honest review of the service from the team itself.
Check it on your own file
Any comparison online is worth exactly as much as its last fact-check, and everyone's prices and features move. So here's the short path: take a document or a clip you actually work with, ideally an awkward one, and run it through without registering. One breakdown a day and two chat questions are available immediately, no email needed. It takes two minutes and answers the question for your work better than any review can.
Cruxly is built around one observation: for most people video and documents show up in the same work, yet the tools for them are somehow separate. We cover both formats on one subscription, with a free plan that carries you through a semester and a clause-by-clause contract breakdown that general-purpose tools don't offer. Take the file sitting unread right now and see what comes back.
Frequently asked questions
Check it on your own file
One breakdown, no account, two minutes. Free.