You should not have to hand over an email to check whether a paragraph reads AI. Most "free" detectors gate the actual score behind a signup wall, show you a teaser, then make you create an account before revealing the breakdown. TextSight does not. The first 3 scans every day run anonymously: paste up to 5,000 characters, click Scan, read the Authenticity Score, the sentence-level evidence, and the Plagiarism Risk in place. No email field, no verification mail, no card capture. Quota tracks against your browser session and IP rather than any identity, so the entire daily allowance works without an account on shared school computers, sensitive client drafts, or quick one-off checks.
The phrase gets thrown around loosely. Plenty of detectors that advertise no signup still require email after the first scan, wall sentence highlights behind an account, or break in incognito because their counter routes to a login screen.
There is no email field on the scan page. Not for the result, not for the highlights, not to reveal the Authenticity Score. The full daily 3-scan allowance runs end to end without an email input appearing anywhere in the flow. No verification mail lands in your inbox after the scan either, because no address was ever collected.
No password to set, no "create your free account to view your full report" interstitial after the spinner. The result panel renders in place and you read it without clicking through anything. The anonymous tier was scoped specifically so the one-off check works without an account on the user side at all.
Anonymous scans are tied to your browser session and IP, not to a row in a user table. There is no record with your email next to text fragments you scanned last week. Sessions live in a browser cookie; clearing cookies or opening a private window starts a fresh anonymous session with no link to prior usage.
Submitted text is processed, scored, returned, and discarded. TextSight does not train the detector or the AI Rewriter on user-submitted text regardless of signup status. That commitment is in the privacy policy and matters more when no identity is attached to the scan in the first place.
Honest accounting of what is in the anonymous path. Same classifier, same scoring depth, same per-sentence evidence as paid. Only daily volume and account-side features differ.
Counter resets at midnight UTC. Tied to your browser session and IP, not to an email. For a student this covers a draft, a revision, and a final pre-submission pass. For a writer it covers a typical day of deliverables. The cap is generous enough that most casual users never hit it, and tight enough to keep the anonymous tier sustainable without an account gate or ad load on the result page.
Roughly 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 number 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 login required 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 multi-model classifier as the paid tier. No source-model gating where ChatGPT works on free but Claude or Gemini detection sits behind a paywall.
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 anonymous quota and a clean panel instead.
3 scans a day at 5,000 chars covers casual personal use indefinitely, with no account. Paid tiers add history sync, file upload, API, and team features. Full details on the pricing page.
Billed $89.88/year — Save $30
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Yearly billing saves 25%. View full pricing →
The full daily anonymous quota works 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 anonymous 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 free. 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 on the anonymous path who would qualify should sign up specifically to take it; 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.
Quota tracking without an account uses two signals: a session cookie and your IP address. Neither links to an identity until you choose to sign up.
The first time you load the app, the browser receives a random session token. It is a string of bytes with no link to your name, email, or any personal identifier. The token exists so the quota counter knows which scans belong to which session within a 24-hour window. Clearing cookies or opening a private window starts a fresh anonymous session with no link to prior activity.
The cookie alone would let anyone wipe their counter by clearing storage every few minutes. A secondary counter against the IP address prevents that. Shared library, coffee shop, or office networks share a single daily quota across every visitor on that IP, which is the intended trade-off for keeping the anonymous tier sustainable.
Because no email is collected on the anonymous path, no marketing email can be sent. There is no drip onboarding sequence, no abandoned-scan follow-up, no "your free scans reset tomorrow" reminder. Nothing follows you out of the browser session.
The text you paste is processed by the classifier, scored, returned to your screen, then dropped from working memory. TextSight does not train the detector or the AI Rewriter on user-submitted text regardless of signup status. The privacy posture on the anonymous tier is strictly stronger than on the paid tiers, because there is no account row to link a scan to in the first place.
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 the 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 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 free, 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, no email verification, no card. The anonymous 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.
The main AI detector landing page with the paid feature set and the full multi-model classifier write-up.
Open AI detector →Accuracy bands on the free tier, ESL calibration, and the case that free really does match paid.
Read the breakdown →Sister no-signup page focused on ChatGPT-specific output: GPT-3.5 through GPT-5, anonymous quota.
See the ChatGPT page →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.