Petal
Verified Oct 16, 2026 ActiveReference manager that answers questions across your PDF library
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $2.55/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Free gives 1 GB and 400 one-off AI credits; paid tiers from $2.55/month on annual early-bird pricing scale storage and monthly credits.
Use tool ↗About Petal
Petal stores research PDFs, extracts and deduplicates their metadata, and lets you question a single document or a whole collection with answers linked back to the passage they came from. It also works as a citation manager with a browser importer, a Word add-in and shareable collections for co-authors. Storage and monthly AI credits are what separate the tiers.
- Platforms
- Web · Chrome extension
- API
- Not confirmed
- Last verified
- Oct 16, 2026
Verified sources
- Free 1 GB / 400 one-off credits; Plus $2.55, Advanced $8.49, Premium $25.49 per month on annual billing; standard rates $4.99 / $9.99 / $13.99; single seat per tierpetal.org ↗
- Operated by Paladin Max, Inc.; Petal created in 2018; team from Caltech and MITpetal.org ↗
- Paladin Max, Inc. registered in California, United Statesopencorporates.com ↗
Is Petal legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Jun 8, 2002 (24 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar GoDaddy.com, LLC, looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Nov 19, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 16, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 16, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2018The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Paladin Max, Inc., United StatesOur research, card verified Aug 16, 2026
Pros & cons of Petal
The one tool in this space that is a real reference manager first and a document chatbot second, which matters if citations are part of your output. If you only need to interrogate a handful of PDFs, a general assistant does that for free.
Pros
- Automatic metadata extraction and deduplication removes the worst part of library upkeep
- Sourced answers link back to the passage rather than paraphrasing without provenance
- Word add-in and browser importer cover the actual writing workflow, not just reading
- Paid entry price is a few dollars a month, far below research-AI subscriptions
Cons
- Free tier's 400 AI credits do not replenish, so it is a trial rather than a usable plan
- 1 GB of free storage fills fast with scanned PDFs
- Multi-document chat and AI Create are locked to the Advanced tier and above
- No API, so it cannot feed a lab's own pipelines
Best for
- Graduate students and academics managing a growing citation library
- Literature reviews where answers must be traceable to a specific source passage
- Small research groups sharing annotated collections with co-authors
Not for
- Teams needing enterprise document management with permissions and audit trails
- Anyone wanting to query documents programmatically
- Users already committed to Zotero groups who would have to migrate everything
Watch out: The headline $2.55 is early-bird annual pricing; standard rates are $4.99 (or $2.99 educational) and every tier is single-seat, so a team pays per person.
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