Glasp marks passages on web pages, PDFs, YouTube transcripts and Kindle books from a browser extension or mobile app, then lets a personal AI summarise and answer from that library. Highlights are public by default; keeping them private sits behind a paid plan.
Glasp is a free social web highlighter for web pages, PDFs, YouTube and Kindle: marked passages land in one searchable library, and a personal AI summarises and answers from that library rather than from the open internet. A sentence marked while reading becomes something an assistant can quote back, source attached.
One design decision shapes everything else. Highlights are public by default, which is what makes the shared reading layer work, and turning any of them private is a Pro feature rather than a free-plan switch. Settle that before the first session: it decides whether client research can go in at all.
The operator is Glasp Inc., published contact address 548 Market St, PMB 26241, San Francisco, CA 94104.
Audience figures on the site do not agree: the home page credits 2,000,000+ researchers, students and lifelong learners, while a navigation entry for the story page describes growth from 0 to 3 million users. Neither carries a measurement date.
One-click summaries cover articles, PDFs and YouTube videos, and chat replies are grounded in what has been saved rather than a general model's training data. The AI Clone is the personal form of that layer: built from the highlights and notes on one account, queried from the profile page, and answerable on other profiles too.
The MCP connector exposes the library to outside assistants through nine tools, eight of them read-only; the one writing tool only adds a page to a reading list, stays off unless switched on at connection time, and can never edit or delete.
One tool is deliberately not about you: for any page, get_community_highlights returns the passages at least two Glasp readers independently marked with a count for each, and never returns who marked what — including for pages never opened.
Adding Glasp as an MCP server uses an OAuth sign-in rather than a pasted token, the connection is read-only by default, tokens are stored only as hashes, and any app or token can be revoked from Settings.
The material that can be highlighted is broader than the name suggests: PDFs, images, YouTube videos, audio transcripts and social media posts are supported directly, podcasts arrive through Snipd, and books as imported Kindle highlights.
Six named workflows ship with the MCP connector and show what a highlight archive is for: what_did_i_miss compares your highlights against what other readers converged on, write_with_citations drafts using only passages you highlighted with each claim carrying its source, weekly_review regroups a period by theme instead of by page, resurface pulls older material back against current reading, steelman_against_me argues the opposite case from your own library, and connect_two_reads puts two sources in conversation.
Recurring export is the third pattern. Notion offers daily auto-sync on paid plans, Workflowy and Tana expose a Daily Sync toggle once connected, and a manual Export All Highlights re-run only sends pages changed since the last export.
Four groups are named with a concrete job each: researchers collecting evidence across papers and the web and then querying their library instead of re-reading it, students turning lectures, PDFs and YouTube into reviewable notes, writers and creators keeping a swipe file to pull into Notion or Obsidian when drafting, and lifelong learners building a personal canon.
Students get a price lever: verified university students receive 40% off Glasp Pro Yearly, the account email has to match a valid .edu or .ac university address, and only the yearly subscription qualifies. It is run as a limited-time offer that may change or end at any time, so it is not a standing entitlement to plan around.
It fits poorly for anyone who cannot accept a public-by-default library on the free plan, and for minors: the terms require every user to represent they are eighteen (18) years of age or older.
| Surface | What the listing reports | Version state |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome extension | 4.5 from 985 ratings, 500,000 users, Featured badge | 2.1.4, updated September 4, 2026, 1.66MiB |
| Firefox extension | 209 users, 3 reviews | 2.1.4, updated Sep 3, 2026, 1.68 MB |
| Android app | 3.4 from 193 reviews, 50K+ downloads, Everyone rating | Updated Sep 12, 2026 |
| iOS app | Free, 4+ age rating | 3.11.1, minimum iOS 15.1 |
The extension covers Chrome, Safari, Edge, Brave, Firefox and Opera plus other Chromium-based browsers, and highlights sync across all of them and into the web and mobile apps on one sign-in. The two extension listings are far apart in install count, which is worth weighing if Firefox is the primary browser.
Rating figures measure different objects and cannot be averaged. The Chrome average covers the browser extension. The Android average covers a separate mobile app. The Firefox listing carries 3 reviews in total, too small a sample to read as a quality signal at all.
The mobile apps were rebuilt in 2026 with a native Reader for articles and PDFs, YouTube summaries and transcripts on the go, chat on any open page, home-screen and Lock Screen widgets, and an iOS extension for mobile Safari.
| Plan | Price | YouTube summaries | AI chat | Audio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | 3 basic per day | 30 file uploads | 20 credits/month | 30 minutes/month |
| Pro | $12.50/month billed annually, $15 monthly | Advanced summaries | 100 uploads | 500 credits/month | 300 minutes/month |
| Unlimited | $30/month billed annually, $360/year | 5,000 advanced per 30 days | Unlimited uploads, 5,000 chat messages/month | 2,000 credits/month | 1500 minutes/month |
Unlimited public highlighting sits on the free plan, so the paywall is not on capture. The paid tiers buy privacy, headroom and automation: unlimited private highlights, advanced YouTube summary output, every AI chat model rather than the fast one, daily auto-sync to Notion, and the larger quotas above.
Two boundaries matter when reading the rows. The pricing page renders with annual billing selected, and the monthly figure appears in prose only for Pro at $15 monthly; the monthly equivalent for Unlimited was not rendered this round. Prices are stated in USD, plans and pricing may change at any time, and taxes may apply.
File export is the one capability that is not tiered: Markdown, HTML, CSV and JSON downloads are on every plan including the free one, though daily auto-sync to Notion is paid-only. Cancellation is self-service at any time, but payments are non-refundable except where required by law, and the account drops to free at the end of the current billing period.
The stated positioning against other highlighters rests on three points: it is free, highlights are shareable without a login and embeddable elsewhere, and saved passages feed an AI you can talk to, including in ChatGPT and Claude through MCP.
Switching cost runs in both directions. A section headed "No lock-in, ever" states that highlights come in from wherever you read and go out to wherever you think, with Readwise, Instapaper, Hypothesis, Weava and Raindrop appearing on the import side and Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Tana, Workflowy and Zotero on the export side alongside plain files.
A signed independent review from August 2025 placed it in a crowded field of highlighters and named the feature set and browser coverage as the differentiators, noting that AI summaries of web pages, PDFs and YouTube videos and chat with highlights are on the free tier. The decision comes down to a private vault with a subscription against a public library with free AI, and flips once the material is confidential.
Content made public by you or a collaborator, and any personal information inside it, is publicly available and can be indexed by search engines; the status is checkable in each item's settings, while profile picture, name, user handle and social handles are published regardless.
The terms draw the matching line: content made public also grants other users and other media the right to access it, whereas content kept private is not made available to other users under that licence — private means invisible to other readers, not to the service.
Authorised third-party apps are the exception. An app connected through the MCP connector or the API can read the highlights, notes, bookmarks, imported book highlights, summaries and reading history covered by the grant, including items marked private. Those grants are revocable in Settings, but until then, private is not a boundary an assistant respects.
The terms require a world-wide, perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, assignable, sublicensable and transferable right to use your content to provide, improve, promote and research the service, naming the development, training and evaluation of machine learning and artificial intelligence models as part of that purpose.
The privacy policy repeats it from the data side: information collected through the service, including content you create and save, may be used to develop, train, evaluate and improve the models used to provide, improve and research it. Data received from Google APIs is excluded under Limited Use requirements.
Outside model providers are handled separately: they are engaged under terms intended to limit use of the content to serving Glasp and are not authorised to train their own models on it, though some retain content briefly for abuse monitoring. A looser path also exists — a user-directed flow where the extension opens an AI website you chose and puts page content into it under your own account, so it lands under that provider's consumer terms and settings.
Deleting an item removes it from view and may mark it as deleted while a limited record is retained to enforce quotas and prevent abuse; erasing personal information rather than hiding it is a contact-us request. Closing an account still leaves billing records with the payment processor, plus a snapshot of account and usage facts kept up to two years to defend a payment dispute.
The FAQ describes a more direct route, account deletion from the Settings page, warning that the account and all learning data associated with it cannot be recovered. Before either, use the export levers: AI Clone visibility switches from Public to Private under Settings, then AI Clone & Hatch, and the same page offers Download Your Learning Memories.
The posted terms are not yet operative: the current text carries a Last Updated date of August 31, 2026 and an Effective Date of September 30, 2026, and states that under a thirty (30) day notice provision the previous version governs until then.
No. They are public by default, which is what makes the shared reading layer work; unlimited private highlights are a Pro feature.
Yes, its own models: content you create and save may be used to develop, train, evaluate and improve the models used to run and research the service.
Unlimited public highlights, 3 basic YouTube summaries per day, 30 PDF uploads and summaries, 20 AI chat credits and 30 minutes of audio transcription per month.
Yes. Markdown, HTML, CSV and JSON downloads are on every plan including the free one, and direct integrations cover Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, Tana and Zotero.
Not for browser highlighting: Android does not allow browser extensions, so that route is iPhone only.
The account and its learning data become unrecoverable, while billing records stay with the payment processor and a usage snapshot is kept up to two years for payment disputes.
Yes: 40% off Glasp Pro Yearly for verified university students, with the account email matching a valid .edu or .ac address. Monthly billing is excluded, and it is offered as a limited-time discount that may change or end at any time.
