Redline — The fine print, decoded.
Read the fine print, fast.
Redline reads a contract the way a suspicious lawyer would: it looks for the clauses that will cost you later, quotes each one word for word, and explains in plain language what it actually does to you.
What it does
You give it a document — pasted text, a PDF with a real text layer, or a public link — and it returns a ranked list of traps. Auto-renewal you cannot escape in time. Unilateral changes to price or terms. Arbitration and venue clauses that decide where you would have to fight. Indemnities that hand you someone else's liability. Deposit deductions, late fees, notice periods measured in the least convenient unit available.
Every flag is anchored to the verbatim clause it comes from, with the document's own characters — not a paraphrase, not a reconstruction. You can see the sentence, its place in the document, why it matters, and what a normal version of that clause looks like.
The report also shows its own audit trail: how many candidate flags were proposed, how many were blocked because the quote could not be found in the document, how many a second reviewer refuted, and how many were downgraded from the severity first assigned. You are told what the machine got wrong, not only what it got right.
Why the fine print keeps winning
Nobody reads terms of service, and everybody knows nobody reads them — which is precisely why the expensive clauses live there. A subscription agreement is written by people paid to protect one side of it, and you meet it at the worst possible moment: at the end of a hiring process, on move-in day, an hour before a launch.
Skimming does not work, because the dangerous clauses do not look dangerous. They are grammatically boring, buried in a numbered subsection, and cross-referenced to a definition four pages earlier. The damage is done by "in accordance with Section 12.3", not by capital letters.
A lawyer is the right answer for a serious contract, and Redline will never pretend otherwise. But you are not sending a €9-a-month SaaS agreement, a gym membership or a flat viewing you have to answer by tonight to a lawyer. For those, the realistic alternative to a machine read is no read at all.
How it works
01
It splits the document by its own numbering
Before anything is analysed, the text is segmented along the structure the document already has — 4.2, §7, Article 3, ¶12. Every later flag therefore points at a real place in a real section, which is what makes the quotes checkable.
02
A first pass proposes candidates against a trap taxonomy
The model does not free-associate about "risky language". It works against a curated taxonomy of the traps that actually recur in consumer and business contracts, each with a known severity and a known likelihood, and proposes candidates that match.
03
A quote gate throws out anything it cannot prove
This step is deterministic, not a model: a candidate survives only if its quote exists in the source text. The document's own characters then replace the model's version of the quote. A flag that cannot point at a sentence in your document never reaches you.
04
A second, independent reviewer tries to refute it
What survives the gate is handed to a fresh pass that reads the same document with the opposite job: confirm, call it overstated, or refute it outright. Unproven flags are dropped and overstated ones lose severity — the report shows both counts.
05
What is left is ranked by what it costs you
The final order combines the severity of the clause type, how likely that trap is to bite in practice, and how confident the verifier was. You read from the top down and stop when you run out of stakes, not when you run out of patience.
When to run it
Before a team rolls out a new SaaS tool
Someone has to read the terms before fifty colleagues put company data in them. Paste the agreement and you get the auto-renewal window, the data and liability clauses and the unilateral-change language in one pass, in time for the decision.
A rental lease you must answer today
Leases are where notice periods, deposit deductions, repair obligations and automatic extensions hide. Reading a flagged list before the viewing beats discovering the clause when you try to leave.
Freelance and contractor agreements
Payment terms, IP assignment, non-solicit, unlimited revisions, indemnity: the clauses that decide whether a good rate is actually a good deal. Run the draft before you counter-propose.
Loans, insurance and anything with a schedule
Fees that only appear on early repayment, exclusions that quietly remove the reason you bought the policy, definitions that narrow a covered event. These are exactly the clauses that reward a slow, adversarial read.
A second opinion on a contract you already read
You went through it yourself and it seemed fine. Ten minutes of machine reading either confirms that with an audit trail, or shows you the subsection you skimmed at three in the morning.
Questions people ask
- Is this legal advice?
- No, and it cannot be. Redline is a fast, structured first read that tells you which clauses deserve a human. For anything with real money or real liability behind it, take the flagged list to a lawyer — you will get a better hour out of them for having one.
- What can I put in?
- Pasted text, a PDF that contains a real text layer, or a public URL the tool can fetch. A scanned photograph of a contract has no text to read, so run it through OCR first or paste the text yourself.
- How do I know it is not inventing clauses?
- Because a flag without a verbatim quote is deleted before you ever see it. The quote gate checks that the cited text really occurs in your document, then substitutes the document's own characters. That check is ordinary code, not a model deciding whether to trust itself.
- Does it find everything?
- No, and it is built to fail in the safer direction. Two passes and a quote gate mean a real trap can occasionally be dropped for lack of proof; the alternative — a confident list of traps that are not in your document — is far more dangerous. Read it as a ranked list of likely problems, not as a certificate.
- Which languages does it read?
- English and Russian documents, including the numbering conventions each uses — sections, paragraph marks, articles. The explanations come back in plain language rather than the legalese they describe.
- What happens to my document?
- It is processed to produce your report, which lives behind its own link. We do not publish, sell or resell what you send. Treat it like any online tool: do not paste material you are contractually forbidden to share.
- How long does a scan take?
- Usually a couple of minutes for a normal contract, because two independent passes read the whole document rather than skimming the first page. Long agreements take longer; the progress is visible while it works.
- Is it free?
- The scan is free and does not need an account. It costs us real money per document, which is a deliberate trade: it is the most convincing demonstration of how the studio builds that we could put on the internet.
Open Redline
Paste the contract you have been meaning to read. Two minutes, no account, and you will know which three clauses matter.
Check a contractredline.autofract.com