Rivul AI Is Free
Every feature of the Multimodal AI Research Workspace is included for every account: turn PDFs, scans and recordings into text, ask your own documents, run AI agents with skills, use Rivul MCP, and search metadata for 300M+ academic papers. AI features use your own API key from Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta.
FreeFor every account
No credit card
No credit card
- Paper search
- Unlimited*
- 300M+ paper records, no API key needed
- AI
- Your own key
- Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta
- Stored PDFs
- 5 at a time
- Up to 10 MB each
- Cost
- Free
- No card, no trial
Everything Included, Free
Each feature with the limit the product enforces. Limits exist to keep the service fast for everyone, not to sell anything.
| Feature | Cost | Limit | AI key |
|---|---|---|---|
| Papers: An editor where a draft keeps its sources: grounded autocomplete, tracked suggestions, and numbered citations. | Free | 2 workspaces per account | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Claim checking against the cited passage | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Evidence table | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Related Work draft | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Draft review | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Reproducibility checklist | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Similarity check | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Preflight before export | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Version history and restore | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Word (.docx) import | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: Word, LaTeX, Markdown and BibTeX export | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Papers: IEEE submission ZIP export | Free | Included with Papers | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Research: Ask a question and get a cited brief and a findings table from the Rivul Index and your Library. | Free | Fair-use rate limits; search needs no key | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Research: Gaps and contradictions across sources | Free | Included with Research | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Research: BibTeX for every source in the note | Free | Included with Research | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Ask Rivul: RAG over your own documents: answers that cite each passage they use, with its page. | Free | Fair-use rate limits | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Rivul MCP: A remote MCP server and REST API: search from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or your own apps. | Free | No daily cap for normal use: fair use of 180 calls a minute and 1,000 a day per person; 1 active API key and 1 MCP key per workspace | No key |
| Rivul MCP: REST API with an OpenAPI schema | Free | Included with Rivul MCP | No key |
| Rivul MCP: OAuth sign-in for AI clients | Free | Included with Rivul MCP | No key |
| Rivul MCP: Access keys | Free | Included with Rivul MCP | No key |
| Rivul MCP: API playground | Free | Included with Rivul MCP | No key |
| Rivul MCP: Usage and activity | Free | Included with Rivul MCP | No key |
| Agents: AI agents that search papers and your library, read the most relevant ones, and write a cited report. | Free | 20 agents; 30 runs a day and 3 a minute; Quick runs up to 5 steps and 150k tokens, Thorough up to 12 steps and 400k tokens | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Agents: Report, evidence table, annotated bibliography, or related work output | Free | Included with Agents | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Agents: Web search where your AI provider offers it | Free | Included with Agents | Uses your own AI key (BYOK) |
| Runs: Every agent run with its steps, the sources it read, and its report, downloadable as Markdown. | Free | Kept with your account | No key |
| Skills: Reusable SKILL.md instructions for agents: 709 skills (65 from Rivul, 644 from the skills.sh community) and your own. | Free | 50 of your own, 20 KB each; 4 per agent | No key |
| Library: A private PDF library with a reader, highlights and notes, full-text search, and Ask this paper. | Free | 5 stored PDFs, 10 MB each | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: PDF reader with highlights and notes | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: Ask this paper | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: Similar papers | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: Open-access PDF fetch | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: OCR and re-extract for scans | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Library: Refresh citation data | Free | Included with Library | No key to use; AI actions use your key |
| Search papers: Search metadata for 300M+ academic papers by title, author, topic, or DOI. | Free | Unlimited*: fair use of 30 searches a minute, 600 an hour, 3,000 a day | No key |
| Search papers: Search suggestions | Free | Included with Search papers | No key |
| Search papers: Saved searches with new-paper checks | Free | Included with Search papers | No key |
| Search papers: DOI lookup | Free | Included with Search papers | No key |
| Connectors: The Google Drive and Google Docs picker, Zotero import and push, AI clients, and your AI provider. | Free | Fair-use rate limits | No key |
| Document OCR: Text or Markdown from PDFs, scans and images, such as a scanned contract, report, or chapter. | Free | 10 files at a time, 25 MB each, first 50 pages | No key |
| Transcribe: Meetings, interviews, lectures and voice notes to timestamped text, exported as .txt, .srt, .vtt or .docx. | Free | 10 files at a time, 500 MB each, 2 hours a day, 10 files an hour; record up to 10 minutes | No key |
| Listen: Any paper, draft, article or long document read aloud, with the sentence being read highlighted. | Free | Browser voice: no limit. Rivul voice: 300,000 characters a day | No key |
| Citation tools: Format a DOI or a saved paper in IEEE, ACM, APA, MLA or Chicago, build BibTeX, convert BibTeX or RIS, and fill an evidence table. | Free | No AI model needed | No key |
| Account: Bring your own key for 6 AI providers, account-data export, an activity log, account deletion, and the same workspace in a phone browser. | Free | Always available | No key |
| Account: Bring your own key: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta | Free | Included with Account | No key |
| Account: Account-data export | Free | Included with Account | No key |
| Account: Activity log | Free | Included with Account | No key |
| Account: Account deletion | Free | Included with Account | No key |
What Needs Your Own AI Key
Searching, reading, converting, citing, checking, and exporting never need an API key or an LLM: search runs on the Rivul Index. Your own key is used only when AI writes something for you.
| Feature | Needs your AI key? | Runs on |
|---|---|---|
| Search papers: search 300M+ records, sort, author search | No | Rivul Index |
| Paper details, DOI and open-access links | No | Rivul Index |
| Rivul MCP and REST search (uses a Rivul MCP key, not an AI key) | No | Rivul Index |
| PDF library: upload, read, annotate, search inside a PDF | No | Rivul |
| Document OCR, Transcribe, and Listen | No | Rivul |
| Skills: browse, write, add from skills.sh | No | Rivul |
| Citations and Citation tools: cite, reference list, renumbering, BibTeX, five styles | No | Rivul |
| Rule-based checks: unsourced claims, claim check, retraction flags, submission preflight | No | Rivul |
| Export | No | Rivul |
| Research: finding and listing papers | No | Rivul Index |
| Research written answer | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| Ask Rivul | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| PDF chat, and Explain on a PDF selection | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| Editor AI actions: rewrite, polish, proofread, tone, summarize, outline, translate, titles, abstracts, review | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| Autocomplete | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| Related Work draft | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |
| Research agents: search, read, and write a cited report | Yes | Your AI provider (BYOK) |