Pricing

Two ways to run it, both free

Hosted. This site is the app. Sign in and you have a project in about a minute — no install, no Docker, no database to look after. It runs on Vercel with a managed Supabase database, and it is maintained by Dhrubojyoti Saha, who also wrote it. That is the version to use unless you have a specific reason not to.

Your own copy. The source is on GitHub and the README is the install: clone it, point it at a Postgres database you control, run it. Same features, same code, none of it held back — the guides page covers the setup and the things that trip people up.

Choose the second one when the corpus itself is sensitive, or when your institution requires that research data stays on its own infrastructure. That is a real requirement in a lot of departments, and the answer to it should not be “trust us”.

What you get, either way

• Every screen described on the features page, with no limits on projects, papers, protocol questions or team members.
• Export to CSV and Excel whenever you want your data out, with protocol question keys as column headers so a script keeps working.
• Encryption for messages and LaTeX sources, with the keys held in your browser rather than on a server. See security.
• The full source under the Apache License 2.0, patent grant included. Fork it, audit it, change it, run it for a department.

What the hosted version costs you instead

Convenience is paid for in trust. On porcupineresearch.me your library, screening decisions, annotations and extracted answers sit in a database somebody else administers — that is what “hosted” means, and no amount of encryption at rest changes who holds the keys to the machine. Your messages and manuscripts are the exception: those are end-to-end encrypted and unreadable to the server by construction.

Security sets out exactly which data is in which tier, and data processing is written for the privacy office that will ask.

Will it stay free?

Free for students and for academic research is the intention, and what holds that open is not this sentence. The source is under the Apache License 2.0, which cannot be withdrawn from a release already made, and the exports work — so if the hosted service ever charged you could take your data and run your own copy the same afternoon. If it does charge, the thing being charged for would be the running of it — the server, the backups, the support — and not features removed from the version you can run yourself.

If that changes, it will be announced on the changelog before it takes effect, not applied to accounts that already exist.

Academic and institutional use

Use it for a thesis, a departmental review, or a funded study. There is no separate licence to request and no quote to ask for. If your university’s privacy office needs the data-handling detail before you can use the hosted version on human-subjects research, the pages they will want are security, privacy and the data processing terms — all three are written for exactly that reader, and all three say plainly where the self-hosted answer differs.