Undermind
Verified Oct 16, 2026 ActiveLiterature search agent that reads candidate papers and follows citation trails instead of ranking keywords.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $16/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Free tier covers chat, deep searches and reports at standard rate limits. Pro is $16/month billed annually and raises usage limits about tenfold; Team is $15 per person per month billed annually; Enterprise is quote-only.
Use tool ↗About Undermind
Undermind is a literature search tool for researchers. Rather than returning a keyword-ranked list, it runs an extended search that reads candidate papers, judges relevance, follows citation trails and reports how thoroughly it covered the topic. It keeps workspaces and paper libraries and can alert you when new relevant work appears. It also exposes an MCP connection so Claude, ChatGPT and other agents can run searches through it. The company was founded in 2023 by two MIT physics PhDs, Tom Hartke and Joshua Ramette, and went through Y Combinator's summer 2024 batch.
- Platforms
- Web
- API
- Not confirmed
- Last verified
- Oct 16, 2026
Verified sources
- Reads and evaluates papers, follows citations, offers alerts and MCP connection for external agents; founded by two MIT quantum physics PhDs, YC-backedundermind.ai ↗
- Free tier at standard rate limits; Pro $16/month annually, Team $15/person/month, Enterprise customundermind.ai ↗
Is Undermind 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
- Jul 10, 2023 (3 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar GoDaddy.com, LLC, looked up Sep 11, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Dec 11, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 16, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 16, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2023The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Undermind, United StatesOur research, card verified Aug 23, 2026
Pros & cons of Undermind
The search actually reads papers rather than matching keywords, which is why it surfaces work that keyword ranking buries. Runs are slow by design and the free tier's rate limits bite quickly, so it earns its keep only if literature review is a regular part of your week.
Pros
- Reports how completely it covered a topic, not just a result list
- Follows citation trails automatically
- Alerts when new relevant papers appear
- MCP connection lets Claude or ChatGPT run searches through it
Cons
- Deep searches take minutes rather than seconds
- Free tier rate limits are tight
- No documented public REST API, only the MCP connector
Best for
- Systematic literature reviews
- Researchers entering an unfamiliar subfield
- Tracking new papers on a narrow topic
Not for
- Quick one-off fact lookups
- Anyone needing full-text access to paywalled papers
Watch out: The $16 Pro price is the annual-billing rate; paying month to month costs more.
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