We're not Chegg.

citeplain is a BrainBytes Studio product. BrainBytes Studio is an indie solo-dev shop with one job — make a citation generator that doesn't insult the people using it.

The dominant free generators (Cite This For Me, EasyBib, BibMe, Citation Machine) are all owned by Chegg. After Chegg acquired them, the experience degraded into 30-second unskippable video ads, paywalled bibliography reads mid-assignment, and surprise $9.99/month auto-charges. That is the bar we work to clear.

How we make money

Pro subscriptions (cloud sync, class-mode shareable bibliography links, Word + Google Docs add-in, 30+ extra styles, Retraction Watch warnings, batch URL import). $4.99/month, $39/year, $89 lifetime for the first 100 founders, $199 lifetime after that.

Not ads. Not data sales. Not selling your library to third parties. The free tier is the whole core tool — paste a URL, pick a style, copy the citation, save to your browser-local library. No email gate. No login wall.

What about Zotero?

Zotero is great — it is the reference manager of choice for grad students and researchers. We are not trying to replace it. citeplain is for the moment when you need onecitation in five seconds and don't want to install a desktop app. If Zotero is your operating system for research, keep using it. We are the gas station, not the garage.

What about ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can format a citation — but it cannot reliably read the publisher's declared author / date / DOI off the page. It will hallucinate. We read the citation_*, og:, dc:, and JSON-LD meta the publisher actually emitted, and only fill in what the page provided. When metadata is missing, we say so instead of inventing.

Contact

Email: support@citeplain.com. Operator details + legal entity sit on the Privacy and Terms pages.