Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches academic papers, summarizes them, and answers questions with cited sources. The free tier covers unlimited paper search and summaries, which is genuinely useful for literature reviews and coursework.

Best for: Finding and summarizing research papers

What you get

• Free Basic plan: unlimited search across 138M+ papers, unlimited paper summaries, and unlimited full-text chat-with-papers
• Free plan limits usage of the Research Agent and Research Reports features; includes Zotero import
• Paid Pro $49/mo (35% off billed annually); Scale $169/mo; Enterprise custom — verify current pricing on their site
• No official student discount; sign up with an academic email and use the free tier for lit reviews

How students use it

• Ask a research question and get papers with extracted findings
• Screen a large set of papers quickly in a table
• Summarize a paper's key claims before you read it