Open the page, paste your text, click Scan. That is the whole flow. No email field, no verification mail, no password setup, no "create a free account to see your result" wall after the spinner. The first 3 scans of every day run anonymously, tied to your browser session and IP rather than to an identity. You see the full Authenticity Score, sentence-level evidence, and Plagiarism Risk before deciding whether an account is worth it. For students on shared school computers, freelancers checking sensitive client drafts, and anyone who does not want a detector login in their email history, this is the path most of the category does not ship.
The phrase gets used loosely in this category. Some detectors that claim it still ask for an email after the first scan, gate sentence highlights behind a verified account, or break in incognito because their cookie-based counter routes to a login screen.
There is no email input on the scan page. Not for the result, not for the highlights, not to unlock the Authenticity Score. The first three scans of the day run end-to-end without an email field appearing anywhere in the flow. No verification email lands in your inbox after the scan either, because no address was ever collected to send one to.
No password to set. No "create your free account to view your full report" interstitial after the scan finishes. The result panel renders in place, and you read it without clicking through anything. The free tier was scoped specifically so the casual one-off check works without an account on the user's side at all.
Anonymous scans are tied to your browser session and IP, not to a profile in a user table. There is no row with your email next to a list of text fragments you scanned last week. Sessions live in a browser cookie; clearing cookies or opening a private window starts fresh.
Submitted text is processed, scored, returned, and discarded. TextSight does not use anonymous or signed-up users' text to train the detector or the AI Rewriter. That commitment is in the privacy policy and matters more when no identity is attached anyway.
Honest accounting of what is in the anonymous path. Same classifier, same scoring depth, same per-sentence evidence as paid. Only volume, history, and integration features differ.
Counter resets at midnight UTC. Tied to your browser session and IP, not to an email. For a student checking one essay this covers a draft, a revision, and a final pre-submission pass. For a freelancer it covers a typical day's deliverables. The cap is generous enough that most casual users never hit it, and small enough to keep the free tier sustainable without an account gate.
About 800 words, the standard college essay length. Long enough for a college essay, a blog draft, or a sample chapter. Longer pieces split into sections, scanned one at a time within the daily three-scan budget. Pro raises the per-scan cap to 10,000 chars and unlocks file upload.
Green, yellow, red on each sentence so you see exactly which lines drove the score. Not paywalled, not summarised into a single overall percentage. Most competitor free tiers hide highlights behind a paid plan; TextSight ships them on the anonymous path because a percentage without evidence is hard to act on.
One paste returns the AI versus human score, a 0 to 100 Authenticity Score on the same scale paid users see, and a Plagiarism Risk read flagging stock phrasings, generic definitions, and citation-risky claims. Three reads on a single paste, no extra clicks, no log-in for the real score.
GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-5, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, Gemini 2.0, Llama 3. Same classifier as the paid tier. No source-model gating, no watered-down "free model" that misses recent ChatGPT versions.
No banner ads, no interstitial upsell prompts pasted over the highlights, no competing-detector advertising. The free tier is funded by paid plans, not by monetising attention on the result page. ZeroGPT lets you scan unlimited text but runs ads on the result; TextSight chose a smaller free quota and a clean result page instead.
3 scans a day at 5,000 chars covers casual personal use indefinitely, anonymously. Paid tiers add history sync, file upload, API, and team features. Full details on the pricing page.
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The first scan and the full daily free quota work without signup. These features sit on the account side of the line, and that gap is what signing up is meant to fill.
Starter, Pro, and Business need an email for billing, receipts, and tax invoices. There is no anonymous paid tier and there cannot be: card processors, refund flows, and GST invoicing all require a real billing contact. If you want to stay on the free quota, no signup. If you want to upgrade, signup is part of the payment surface, not a separate gate.
The single biggest practical reason to sign up on the free tier. Without an account, past scans stay tied to the browser session that produced them. Closing the tab loses access to the result. A free signup adds 7 days of history that follows you between phone, laptop, and tablet. Pro extends history to 90 days, Business keeps everything.
Students with a verified .edu email get Pro at $14.99 effective on annual rather than the standard $19.99 monthly. The discount is gated behind email verification because the .edu check is the entire mechanism. Anyone using the no-signup path who would qualify should sign up specifically to take it; the savings are roughly $60 a year on annual billing.
Shared scan history, multi-seat workspaces, role-based access, and the per-organisation audit log all sit on Business. Right for content agencies running detection across multiple writers, university departments tracking submissions, and any team that needs a record of who scanned what and when. Audit log implies user records, which implies signup.
The TextSight Chrome extension that scans selected text on any webpage requires authentication. So does the REST API for wiring detection into a CMS, LMS, automation pipeline, or custom writing app. Both surfaces need an account to issue an API key or extension token. The Chrome extension is available from Starter upward; API access from Starter and above.
The anonymous path is paste-only. PDF, DOCX, and TXT file upload and URL ingest start at Pro and require an account. Business adds branded PDF reports with your organisation logo on each detector output, useful when results need to be shared back as a deliverable. Both assume a paid account and a verified billing relationship.
A genuine no-signup detector is rarer than the marketing copy suggests. Here is how the major free detectors compare on email gate, ad load, and feature parity with their own paid tier.
Free tier needs email signup, gives 5 scans a day at 5,000 chars, and shows basic highlights. Account is tied to every scan you ever run, which surfaces in the dashboard but also in any audit of your inbox.
Enterprise-grade login flow, no anonymous path. Trial only, then paid. Detection itself is competitive, but the entry barrier is the highest in the category.
Shows a 2,000-character demo without signup, then walls full report behind email verification. The demo is enough to evaluate the tool; the full workflow is not no-signup.
First scan runs without signup, then email gate triggers before the second. Practically a single-shot anonymous flow rather than a sustained free tier.
The closest direct competitor on the no-signup axis. Higher character cap (15,000) and unlimited scans, but the result panel runs third-party ads and sentence-level highlights are paid-only. Privacy posture is weaker because the ad network logs the visit.
3 scans a day at 5,000 chars, sentence highlights on the free tier, Authenticity Score and Plagiarism Risk bundled, no ads on the result, no email on first scan or any of the daily quota. Fewer scans than ZeroGPT, but a clean result page and the same classifier paid users get.
Four steps from paste to verified result. No account-creation step, no email verification, no card. The free tier was scoped specifically for this loop.
The text input renders immediately. No login prompt, no modal, no email gate. If you have used the detector before on this browser, the daily quota counter shows in the corner; if not, you start with the full 3 scans available.
Up to 5,000 characters. The character counter updates as you type or paste. Most college essays fit in one paste; longer pieces split into roughly six sections at the free cap. There is no upload button on the anonymous path; paste is the only ingest method until you sign up for Pro and unlock file ingest.
The classifier runs in about six to ten seconds for an 800-word piece. The result panel shows an overall AI versus human score, the 0 to 100 Authenticity Score, the Plagiarism Risk read, and sentence-by-sentence colour highlights in one view. No interstitial, no signup wall pasted over the result.
No single detector is the final word. If the score reads borderline, paste the passage into a second detector and compare. Treat the agreement of two independent classifiers as a stronger signal than either one alone. Two more scans remain in the daily allowance for re-checking after edits, and the counter resets at midnight UTC.
Anonymous is right for one-off scans, sensitive drafts, and shared computers. Four patterns push users toward at least a free signup, sometimes a paid plan.
Most writers draft on a laptop and revise on a phone, or vice versa. The anonymous path keeps history tied to a single browser session, which means past scans do not follow between devices. A free signup adds 7 days of synced history across every device logged into the same account. If your workflow involves more than one device, the inconvenience of re-pasting accumulates fast.
Students with a verified .edu email get Pro at $14.99 effective on annual rather than the standard $19.99 monthly. The discount is the largest single price reduction on the platform and requires signup to verify the .edu address. Anyone who would qualify and plans to upgrade should sign up before paying.
Active freelancers, SEO writers with weekly deadlines, dissertation students editing chapters, and teachers running spot-checks all hit the 3-scan cap fast. Starter at $7.49 effective on annual lifts the cap to 20 scans per day and adds the Chrome extension. Pro at $14.99 effective on annual gives unlimited detector scans and the 10,000-char per-scan cap so long-form text does not need to be chunked.
Multi-writer agencies, university departments scanning submissions in batches, and publishing teams that need shared scan history all need Business. Shared workspaces, audit log, white-label PDF reports, 5 team seats, and the bulk endpoint are scoped for exactly this case at $29.99 effective on annual. None of these features work without a real account model behind them.
The main ChatGPT detector landing page with the paid feature set and the full classifier write-up.
Open ChatGPT detector →Free-tier scope, the five ChatGPT-specific signals, ESL false-positive guardrails, and the 30-second workflow.
Read the breakdown →Sister no-signup tier for the AI rewriter side of the workflow: 1,500 words a month, all three modes anonymous.
Try the free AI rewriter →Full tier breakdown for Free, Starter, Pro, and Business. Annual billing saves 25%.
See pricing →3 anonymous scans a day, 5,000 chars per scan, sentence-level evidence, Authenticity Score and Plagiarism Risk in the same scan. Same classifier as paid. Your first scan in about ten seconds, with no signup wall between you and the result.