Alfred Scholar Release Notes

Alfred Scholar now has five plans: Basic, Plus, Pro, Lab and Enterprise, with monthly allowances and a new Plus plan for coursework and early research.

Alfred Scholar used to be sold as Pro, Lab and Campus, with a free plan underneath. That left a gap: a student in their first year paid the same as someone finishing a thesis. There are now five plans, each with one line that says who it is for.

The plans

• Basic, for trying Alfred. It costs nothing and needs no card: 3 documents, 20 AI messages a month (up to 5 a day), 60 pages a month, and citations and manuscripts in every style.
• Plus, for coursework and early research. ₹499 a month in India, $12 elsewhere. Unlimited documents, 30 AI messages and 90 pages a month (about 3 papers), 2 plagiarism checks, Loops, Second Brain, Zotero and Mendeley sync, one peer reviewer, and your own AI key if you have one.
• Pro, for your thesis and serious research. ₹1,299 a month in India, $29 elsewhere. Everything in Plus, with 60 AI messages and 200 pages a month (about 7 papers), a Telescope analysis, a Viva Prep and a review by Alfred each month, 5 plagiarism checks and 3 peer reviewers.
• Lab, for labs and research groups. ₹5,999 a month in India, $129 elsewhere, for five seats: a PI and four researchers. 250 AI messages shared across the group, 1,000 pages a month (about 35 papers), 4 Telescope analyses, 4 Viva Preps, 4 reviews by Alfred and 25 plagiarism checks.
• Enterprise, for universities, colleges and institutes. This is what Campus was, under a plainer name: seats at the scale of a department, central billing and purchase orders, onboarding and training, priority support, and if you need it, a deployment of your own. Write to [email protected].

Annual billing still gives two months free on every paid plan. The pricing page compares every allowance side by side.

Why the allowances are monthly

Research does not arrive evenly. There are weeks spent deep in a literature review and weeks spent quietly writing, and a daily ceiling punished the first kind: a good afternoon could end at a limit that would have been nowhere near reached over the month. Every paid allowance now counts across the calendar month and resets at its start, so you can spend it when the work asks for it. Basic keeps a small daily ceiling as well, so a free account is not spent in one sitting.

Pages are counted alongside messages because reading a paper is where much of the work happens. A 30-page paper uses 30 pages of your month, once, when it is processed. Each plan also sets a longest document, from 50 pages on Basic to 500 on Lab, and a document past either line is held back with a note that says why rather than failing silently.

What has not changed

• The trial. Every new account still starts with 7 days of Pro, free and with no card. When it ends, the workspace moves to Basic, and you keep everything.
• The guarantee. Paid plans keep the 7-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel any time.
• Your own key. On Plus and above, connecting your own AI key lifts the message allowance. Pages, Telescope, reviews and plagiarism checks stay on the plan.
• Your work. Nothing in your library moves or disappears with a change of plan.

The sign-in and account screens now walk through a paper's whole life in Alfred Scholar, and Alfred waves hello beside the form.

The screen you see before your workspace now shows what waits inside it. Signing in, creating your account, resetting a password, and confirming your email all open beside a short, quiet walk through a project from first search to submission.

What changed

• A workspace window plays each step of a project in turn: finding papers, asking questions with cited answers, gathering notes, finding research gaps, writing, checking against journal guidelines, checking for plagiarism and AI-sounding writing, peer review, and ready to submit. A list beside it marks each step as it finishes.
• The research gaps step looks like the real thing: Alfred reads your papers, then lists the gaps it found with the pages each one rests on.
• Alfred, the same graduate who answers your questions inside the app, now sits beside the sign-in form. He waves hello when you arrive and glances at whichever field you are filling in.
• The background is cleaner, with the decorative dots and lines removed, so the form reads crisply in both light and dark mode.

What stays the same

Everything works exactly as before: the same accounts, the same security, nothing to relearn. If your device is set to reduce motion, the walkthrough shows its finished state and Alfred holds still.

One trial for everyone, in India and everywhere else: 7 days of full Pro from the moment you sign up, with no card. When it ends, you keep everything.

There used to be two ways in, depending on where you were reading from. Now there is one, and it is the same for everyone.

What changed

• The same trial everywhere. In India and outside it, a new account gets 7 days of full Pro. Not a reduced version of it.
• No card. The trial asks for no payment details, and nothing is charged during it or after it.
• It starts when you sign up. There is nothing to choose and nothing to activate. Your first paper can go in straight away.
• You keep everything afterwards. When the seven days are up, the workspace moves to the free plan. Your library, citations, and reference sync stay where they are, with lighter limits on documents and questions. Upgrade when you are ready, not before.
• One trial per person, as before.
• Testimonials earn a week again. An approved testimonial now adds 7 days of Pro, back from a single day.

Prices have not moved. Pro and Lab still cost what they did in each country, and paid plans keep the 7-day money-back guarantee.

Second Brain notes now keep their tables and checklists, the editor gains a formatting bar, and every Alfred answer can be copied in one tap.

Second Brain is where your research thinking accumulates, so it should hold the shapes that thinking takes: a table of action items, a checklist for next week, a prompt you mean to reuse. This release makes those work properly.

Tables and checklists stay intact

Notes with tables now display as tables, and they stay tables when you edit and save. Checklists keep their ticks. If a note’s table looked like rows of vertical bars, open it again: it now reads as a table, and saving it once tidies it for good.

A formatting bar in the editor

The note editor has a quiet row of tools above it: headings, bold, italic, bulleted and numbered lists, checklists, quotes, links and tables. Inside a table you can add or remove rows and columns from the same bar.

If you prefer to type, markdown works as you go. Start a line with

for a heading,

for a list,

[ ]

for a checklist item or

for a quote.

Copy any answer

Every finished answer from Alfred now has a small Copy button beneath it, in Ask Alfred and in the Alfred panel on every page. Code and drafted text, such as a prompt or an email Alfred writes for you, sit in their own block with a copy button of their own.

Titles read as you wrote them

Note and folder names with characters like

&

,

<

or

now save and display exactly as typed. A name that already shows odd characters is corrected the next time you rename it.

Alfred now works beside you in Ask Alfred, Second Brain, Citations, My documents, and the manuscript editor. He sees what is on the page, answers from your sources, and proposes changes you confirm. Pro now includes 500 AI messages a day and Lab 1,500.

Until now, Alfred lived in two places: Ask Alfred and Second Brain. Everywhere else, asking him something meant leaving the page you were working on. He is now an assistant across your workspace, on the pages where the work happens: Ask Alfred, Second Brain, Citations, My documents, and the manuscript editor.

How Alfred works on your pages

• Open him from the page you are on. On Second Brain, Citations, My documents, and the manuscript editor, an Ask Alfred pill sits at the bottom of the page. Select it, or press Cmd+J (Ctrl+J on Windows and Linux), and Alfred opens beside your work. Press the shortcut again to close him.
• He sees what is on the page. Alfred reads the notebook, library, folder, or draft in front of you, so you can ask about it directly instead of describing it first. A short note at the top tells you what he can see.
• He answers from your sources. Answers cite the documents and citations they come from, so you can check every claim.
• He suggests, you decide. When a request calls for a change, Alfred proposes it as a card. Nothing changes until you confirm the card.

In Second Brain

On the notebook and on any note, Alfred can:

• Save a new note
• Connect two notes
• Create a folder
• Move a note into a folder

In Citations

• Add a citation from its details: title, authors, and type.
• Fix a citation by correcting fields such as the title, journal, date, pages, or DOI.

In My documents

• Create a folder
• Move documents into a folder, up to 50 at once
• Open a document
• Rename a folder
• Move a folder to Trash, along with the documents in it, where you can restore it. Renaming and deleting follow your role in the workspace.

In the manuscript editor

• Insert a citation from your library at the cursor.
• Tidy references into one References section at the end of the draft.
• Open a check for you: Submission guidelines, Manuscript check, Spelling, or Viva preparation.

References in the manuscript editor

• An inline marker, nothing more. Inserting a citation now places only the in-text marker where your cursor is. Your paragraph stays whole.
• One References section. The draft ends in a single References section in the citation style you chose, titled Works Cited for MLA.
• Tidy references. Drafts written before this change may carry full references scattered through the text. Tidy references gathers them into the one section at the end.

A larger daily allowance

• Pro: 500 AI messages a day, up from 50
• Lab: 1,500 AI messages a day, up from 150

The allowance is still shared across Ask Alfred, voice dictation, and rewriting or humanising text in a manuscript, and it still resets each day. With Alfred now on more of your pages, a long working day should rarely come near it.

How it works

On My documents, ask Alfred for papers you do not have yet. He searches published literature, says which papers have an open PDF, and imports the ones you choose into your library. A paper without an open PDF can be saved as a citation instead.

Until now, Alfred on My documents could only search the papers you had already uploaded. Ask him for something new and he would tell you to go and find it yourself. He can now search published literature from the same panel, and bring the papers you choose into your library.

• Ask for what you do not have. On My documents, open Alfred and ask for papers on a topic, by an author, or by title. He searches arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and Crossref.
• Every result is labelled. Alfred says which papers have an open PDF you can import and which do not, usually because they sit behind a publisher’s paywall. He only offers an import when the search found a free PDF, and says so when that PDF has not been checked yet.
• No duplicates. Papers already in your library or your citations are named as already there, not offered again.
• Import with one tap. For a paper with an open PDF, Alfred proposes an import card, into a folder you already have or the top level. Nothing is added until you confirm. The paper is ready to read and search a few minutes later.
• Keep the reference when there is no PDF. For a paper without an open PDF, Alfred offers to add it to your citations by its DOI, so you still have the reference for your writing.

Importing papers and adding citations follow your role in the workspace.

The Ask Alfred pill at the bottom of your pages is now Alfred himself: a small graduate in a mortarboard. Select him, or press Cmd+J, to open Alfred beside your work.

The Ask Alfred pill at the bottom right of Second Brain, Citations, My documents, and the manuscript editor is now Alfred himself: a small graduate in a mortarboard with an amber tassel. He sits in the same place and opens the same Alfred you already use.

What he does

• Opens Alfred. Select him, or press Cmd+J (Ctrl+J on Windows and Linux), and Alfred opens beside your work.
• Stays out of your way. At rest he only blinks now and then, so he never pulls your eye while you read or write.
• Says when he is ready. Point at him and he looks up, waves, and shows his name and shortcut.
• Shows he is working. While an answer is on its way, his eyes scan and his tassel swings at the top of the panel.

If you have reduced motion turned on in your system settings, Alfred keeps still: no blinking, waving, or swinging.

Mark a manuscript Final, open the Reviewers panel, and add Alfred alongside the people you invited. It reviews citation integrity, claims against the sources they cite, argument and method, and writing, and files what it finds in a triage panel you accept or dismiss.

Peer review has always meant waiting. You finish a draft, hand it to your guide or a colleague, and the mechanical problems sit in the manuscript until someone with a week of their own work finds time to read it: a citation marker pointing at a source you deleted months ago, the same paper entered twice under two records, a sentence that claims rather more than the paper behind it does. Alfred can now sit on that reviewer list alongside the people you invited.

What changed

• Alfred is a reviewer, not a button. Mark a manuscript Final, open the Reviewers panel, and add Alfred the way you add anyone else. It reads the whole manuscript and reviews it the way a reviewer does.
• Citation integrity, record by record. Markers pointing at a source that no longer exists, the same paper cited twice under two records, DOIs that do not resolve, a manuscript that cites sources but carries no reference list, and citation styles that drift between two forms. For a reference list you typed by hand, it also finds entries you never cited and in-text markers with no matching entry.
• Claims read against the sources they cite. For a claim that cites a source, Alfred reads the source and says one of three things: the source supports the claim, the claim goes further than the source does, or the source does not support it.
• Argument and method, one section at a time. Claims asserted without support, conclusions the evidence does not reach, contradictions between sections, design choices left unjustified, limitations that are missing, assumptions never stated.
• The writing checks you already had. Spelling that drifts between two forms, jargon with a plain equivalent, genuinely wordy phrasing, phrasing that reads as AI, typography, and abbreviations used before they are defined.
• A triage panel, not a flood of comments. Findings arrive grouped by category and by severity (must fix, should fix, consider) rather than landing in your threads. Accept the ones worth keeping and each becomes a real comment thread anchored to its passage. Dismiss the rest and the manuscript is untouched.
• Numbered rounds you can compare. Every run is a round, stamped with the manuscript version it read. Round two sits beside round one, so you can see what you fixed.
• A coverage panel for what was not checked. Alfred can only check a citation when it can reach the source: the paper is in your library, or it is open access, or its abstract is reachable. When none of those hold, the citation is listed as unchecked and Alfred produces no finding about it.
• No seat, and no score. Alfred does not take one of your paid reviewer seats, and the review carries no score and no verdict. It is a review to read and judge, like any other.

Why

The expensive part of peer review is not the reading, it is the waiting, and a good deal of what comes back was mechanical all along. A supervisor’s one careful pass should not be spent on a DOI that does not resolve, or on a sentence that claims more than the paper it cites. Those findings can be produced before anyone human opens the file, which leaves the reader with a draft where the only things left are the ones that need judgement.

That is also why the coverage panel exists. Alfred reviews the citations it can actually read. A paper behind a publisher’s paywall, with no copy in your library and no abstract to work from, is a paper Alfred has not read, and the review says so instead of producing a confident finding about a source it never saw. This is the same discipline as the originality check, which searches open-access literature and the open web and states plainly that it does not search paywalled journal archives. A review you can trust is one that tells you where it stopped looking.

Run it before you take the draft to your guide or the journal, not instead of them.

Alfred as a reviewer is available on the Pro and Lab plans: 3 review rounds a month on Pro, 10 on Lab.

Open a draft manuscript, run Viva Prep, and Alfred reads the whole thing and drafts the questions an examining committee would put to you, answering each one from your own sections. The result is filed as a note you can keep working on.

Preparing for a viva has meant leaving your workspace, pasting chapters into a general chatbot, and getting back questions with no connection to what you actually wrote. Viva Prep does it inside Alfred Scholar, against the manuscript itself.

What changed

• One action in the manuscript editor. Viva Prep sits in the checks bar of a draft manuscript, next to Guidelines, AI Writing Check, and Spelling. Run it and Alfred reads the whole manuscript.
• Questions grouped the way a committee thinks. Motivation and contribution, literature and positioning, methodology and design, results and analysis, limitations and validity, implications and future work. The same six themes every time, so a second run is comparable to the first.
• Every answer names the section it came from. Not a general answer about your field, but one drawn from your own writing, with the heading it rests on, so you can go and check it.
• It says so when your manuscript does not answer a question. The questions you cannot yet answer are the most useful thing on the list, and they are marked as such rather than filled in with something invented.
• The result is a note, not a panel. Viva Prep files the questions into a Viva Prep folder in your Second Brain, where you can annotate them, link them, and come back the week before the defence.
• Running again refreshes the same note. No duplicates piling up in your notebook. If you have edited the note yourself since the last run, Alfred asks before replacing it.

Why

A viva is an oral defence of work you spent years on, and the preparation for it is mostly a matter of anticipating where someone will push. That is a question about your manuscript, not about your field in general, so the answers have to come from your manuscript. Everything here is traceable back to a section you wrote, because an answer you cannot locate in your own thesis is not an answer you can give in the room.

Viva Prep is available on the Pro and Lab plans.

A Telescope column that had found its answer could still settle as failed. It no longer does. Offline drafts also recover on their own if the browser drops the connection mid-session.

Three reliability fixes, all of them cases where Alfred had the answer and lost it on the way to you.

Telescope columns no longer fail on work that succeeded

A Telescope cell could read “We could not extract this column” even when the extraction had gone perfectly and every claim, quote and page reference was ready. The answer was there; the step that hands it over rejected it and marked the cell failed. Re-running it produced the same result, which made the column look genuinely impossible rather than merely stuck.

Those columns now come through with their claims intact. Nothing about how strictly we check the evidence has loosened: a column that truly has nothing to report still says so honestly, and a column we cannot verify still refuses to invent one. If you have an analysis with a failed column, re-run it and it should fill in.

Offline drafts recover on their own

If your browser closed its connection to the offline store partway through a session, which can happen when a second tab opens or the browser reclaims space in the background, the workspace kept accepting your edits without actually saving them offline. The pending-changes indicator went on saying work was queued while nothing was being written.

The workspace now notices and reconnects on its own. Your writing keeps being saved, and what you had already written was never at risk.

Slow sources fail instead of hanging

When Zotero, Mendeley or a paper host went unresponsive, a request could sit waiting long enough to time the whole page out, giving you an error with nothing in it. Those calls now give up on their own and tell you which source did not answer, so you can retry that one thing rather than the whole action.

What changed

Pro and Lab can be bought from anywhere, priced in US dollars outside India. Outside India, a 7-day trial starts without a card and settles onto a free plan rather than locking you out.

Until today, Alfred Scholar could be used from anywhere but bought only from India. That gap is closed. Pro and Lab are now on sale worldwide, priced in Indian Rupees in India and in US dollars everywhere else.

• Pro is $19 a month or $190 a year outside India. In India it stays ₹899 a month and ₹8,999 a year.
• Lab, which covers a supervisor and four researchers, is $99 a month or $990 a year outside India, and stays ₹4,499 a month and ₹44,999 a year in India.
• Annual billing saves roughly a sixth against paying monthly, in both currencies.
• The pricing page and your billing page now quote the currency you will actually be charged in, rather than showing rupees to everyone.

Trials differ by region, on purpose

In India the trial is unchanged: ₹48 for three days of full Pro, continuing as Pro unless you cancel.

Outside India, a new account gets 7 days of full Pro without entering a card. When the week is up, nothing is locked and nothing is charged. The workspace settles onto a free plan and keeps working, with lighter limits on documents and questions. Upgrading is a decision you can make in your own time, or not at all.

We split the two deliberately. A small real charge is a fair signal in a market that knows us; asking a stranger for a card before they have read a single paper is not.

The free plan

The free plan is not a locked screen. Your library, your citations and your reference sync keep working. What it limits is volume: a few documents and a modest number of questions a month. If you outgrow it, Pro is there.

Prices in India have not moved

If you are in India, nothing about what you pay has changed with this release.

Three days of full Pro access for ₹48, which continues as Pro unless you cancel. The Founding Scholar lifetime edition is closed.

Three days of full Pro access now cost ₹48, and they continue as Pro when the three days are up. It is a small change with a simple reason behind it: a trial that ends by locking you out is a bad moment to hand someone in the middle of a chapter.

What changed

• The Pro trial is ₹48 for 3 days. It is still complete Pro access, not a reduced version of it.
• When the three days end, the workspace continues on Pro at ₹899 a month. Nothing pauses, and nothing turns read-only mid-sentence.
• Cancel any time during the three days and nothing further is charged. Your access still runs to the end of the third day.
• Your billing page names the exact date the monthly plan begins, so the charge is never a surprise.
• One trial per person, as before.

The Founding Scholar edition is closed

All one hundred numbered seats were claimed. The edition is no longer on sale.

If you hold a seat, nothing changes for you. Your Pro access is permanent, there is no renewal to miss, and your seat number stays on your billing page exactly as it was.

Outside India

Alfred Scholar is sold in India today, priced in Indian Rupees. You can use it from anywhere; what we do not have yet is a way to take payment from outside India. Institutions anywhere can still be set up directly on Campus. Write to

[email protected]

and we will arrange access.

A note on testimonials

An approved testimonial now adds a day of Pro rather than a week. With the trial itself costing ₹48, a week of free Pro had quietly become the cheaper way in, which was never the point of asking for one.

The whole app now shares one refined palette with our website, every tool keeps a single signature color everywhere it appears, and the interface type has been upgraded for long reading sessions.

Alfred Scholar’s workspace has been retuned end to end so the app, the website, and every email you receive from us speak the same visual language.

What changed

• Each tool now keeps one signature color everywhere it appears. Loops is always its warm red, Citations its amber-orange, Telescope its green, Ask Alfred its teal, Second Brain its sky blue, whether you see them in the sidebar, a page header, the command palette, or an upgrade card. No more spotting the same feature in two different colors on one screen.
• Dark mode moved from a blue-tinted night to calm neutral greys, the same dark canvas as our website, which is easier on the eyes over long sessions.
• Buttons, links, and focus outlines settled on one deeper, steadier blue with clearer contrast in both themes.
• The interface typeface was upgraded, and code and citation keys now render in a proper monospaced face instead of borrowing the text font.
• Exported PDFs, plagiarism reports, and transactional emails were retuned to the same palette, so what leaves the app matches what you see inside it.
• The command palette can now jump straight to Telescope and Loops.

What stays the same

Nothing moved and no feature changed. This is a consistency pass: the product simply agrees with itself, from the first pixel of the loading screen to the last page of an exported PDF.

Every page now shows what comes next, one name for the trial, and a trial button that follows you on mobile.

The marketing site had grown page by page, and it showed. Pages that talked about what a plan includes had no way to reach the plans. Comparison pages sat in one corner, feature pages in another, and nothing led between them. On a phone, the only way to start a trial was to open the menu and scroll to the bottom.

What’s new

• Every page shows what comes next - the foot of each feature, comparison and audience page now offers three routes: somewhere to go deeper, a comparison against the tool you already use, and the plans.
• Pricing is reachable from anywhere - it now sits in the footer and at the close of every page, instead of only in the top navigation.
• One name for the trial - the button said twenty-one different things depending on where you found it. It now says the same thing everywhere: start your 3-day trial.
• A trial button on mobile - once you have read past the opening, a slim bar keeps the price and the trial within reach. It can be dismissed, and it stays out of the way on the pricing and contact pages.
• A comparison hub you can navigate - the ten comparisons are now grouped by the kind of tool you are replacing, so you can start from what is on your desk today.
• Clearer comparison pages - each one now carries a breadcrumb, a date on the competitor pricing it quotes, and a link into the features it discusses.

Fixed

• The quick-start guide linked to a sign-up page that did not exist.
• Comparison pages listed a browser extension as coming soon. It is not on the roadmap, so the tables no longer say it is.
• Headings on the comparison pages were a size smaller than the rest of the site, and the pricing page was missing its structured data for frequently asked questions.

Search your library and Alfred now looks across arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref and Shodhganga too, so you can save what you are missing without leaving the page.

Until now, searching your library could only tell you what you already had. If you owned nothing on a topic, you got an empty page and had to go looking somewhere else.

What’s new

• Papers you do not have yet - search your library and results from arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref and Shodhganga appear underneath your own documents, each one labelled with where it came from.
• Save without leaving - when an open-access PDF is available, save it straight into your library and pick a folder on the way in. It begins processing immediately, ready to read, cite and chat with.
• Honest about what you can reach - papers with no open-access PDF are marked as such rather than quietly dropped, so you can still follow them to the source.
• Find your own papers by their real title - library search now matches a paper’s published title and DOI, not just the filename. Something you uploaded as scan_001.pdf is findable by its actual name.

Also fixed

A search that matched nothing in your library could show an empty page instead of saying so. It now tells you plainly, and points you to what was found elsewhere.

Why this matters

Research rarely starts from what you have already filed. Searching once, seeing both what you own and what exists, and filing the useful ones in the same motion keeps you in one place, instead of moving between your library, a search engine and a publisher’s site to answer a single question.