Frequently Asked Questions

ClearTerm is an AI contract review tool for freelancers and independent professionals. You upload a contract as a PDF and it returns a safety score out of 100, a breakdown across payment terms, IP and ownership, liability, and termination and scope, and a plain-English explanation of each risk it finds — along with wording you can reuse to negotiate.

ClearTerm extracts the text from your PDF server-side, then sends it to Google Gemini with a prompt that reviews it from the freelancer's side. It checks the same four areas every time — payment, IP and ownership, liability, and termination and scope — assigns each finding a severity, and derives the safety score by deducting 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 reliably surfaces 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 We do not publish an accuracy figure because we have not measured one.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; and operational records with no contract content in them — scan telemetry and payment idempotency markers 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 the agreements freelancers sign: service agreements, statements of work, NDAs, master service agreements, consulting agreements, and brand or sponsorship deals. It works on other contracts too, but the risk framing assumes you are the contractor rather than the client.

PDFs with selectable text, up to 4 MB and 300 pages. Those limits apply to the file. The analysis itself reads up to 100,000 characters of extracted text on the free plan — roughly 30-40 pages of contract prose — and 1 million characters on Pro. A longer document is rejected rather than silently truncated, so you are never shown an analysis of part of a contract. Scanned or photographed contracts will not work — ClearTerm reads the text layer in the file and does not run OCR, so an image-only PDF is rejected with a message asking for a text-based one.

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 per month without an account. A free account includes 5 scans per month. Pro is $9 per month and includes 50 scans, composed negotiation emails with tone control, a searchable archive of past scans, and priority support.

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 upgrade to Pro at any point to raise the limit to 50 scans per month.

The recurring ones are: payment terms of Net 60 or longer with no deposit, broad IP assignment that hands over work you intend to reuse, unlimited or undefined revisions, uncapped indemnity, one-sided termination rights, and automatic renewal with no notice window. ClearTerm checks for all of these, and the blog covers each in depth.

Yes. Every risk it finds comes with a ready-to-copy negotiation snippet you can paste into an email, on every plan. Pro 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.