AskYourPDF Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

AskYourPDF became widely known in 2023 as one of the most popular ChatGPT plugins for reading PDFs. After OpenAI retired the plugin store in 2024, it grew into a standalone web app, Chrome extension and API. The company says more than five million readers use it and that files are stored on UK servers under GDPR and are not used to train AI models. Its users are mostly students, researchers, lawyers, analysts and professionals who work with long documents such as papers, reports, contracts, manuals and textbooks. Accepted formats include PDF, DOCX, EPUB and TXT files, plus web links that the tool fetches and processes.

The main workflow is upload, ask and verify. You drop a file into the chat reader and type questions such as asking for a summary, the methodology of a study, or every indemnification clause in a contract. Answers include citations that jump to the source page, and follow-up questions keep the document's context. A Knowledge Base lets paid users chat with several documents at once to compare or synthesize them. Other tools include a summarization service, OCR for scanned PDFs on Premium and above, and a Chrome extension that works with PDFs and pages in the browser. AskYourPDF also offers a research assistant for finding academic papers and a developer API.

AskYourPDF lets users switch models per question. The free plan runs on GPT-5 Mini. Paid plans add GPT-5, GPT-5.2, GPT-5 Nano and Gemini 2.5 Flash, plus Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro, which use credits. Premium includes 10 credits and Pro 30, with more available on Enterprise. The company suggests Claude 4.5 Opus for legal nuance and Gemini 2.5 Pro for multilingual sources. Like other retrieval tools, AskYourPDF splits documents into chunks and retrieves relevant passages, so broad questions about a whole long file can miss context, and citations are worth checking against the page.

The Free plan allows one document a day of up to 100 pages and 15 MB, 50 questions a day and three conversations, on GPT-5 Mini. Premium costs $11.99 a month on annual billing and allows 50 documents a day, 2,500 pages and 31 MB per file, 1,200 questions a day, OCR, Knowledge Base and the Chrome extension. Pro costs $14.99 a month on annual billing, with 150 documents a day, 6,000 pages and 877 MB per file and longer replies. Monthly billing costs about 25 percent more, and a $1 Premium trial is offered. Enterprise is custom. Subscriptions are non-refundable but can be canceled at any time.

AskYourPDF's strengths are generous page limits, model choice across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, multi-document chat and low prices on annual plans. Its weaknesses are a busy interface with upsells, credits required for the strongest models, a non-refundable billing policy and answer quality that depends on retrieval. ChatPDF is simpler for quick questions. PDF.ai adds Capture & Ask for charts and a parsing API. ChatDOC handles tables and complex layouts well. NotebookLM is free and turns sources into study aids, and Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant works inside Acrobat. Choose AskYourPDF if you read long documents often and want model choice at a low price.