Terms of use
What you can expect from us, and what we expect from you. Written to be understood.
Last updated 15 October 2026. Gapnostic is a product of Kairos Solutions. Using Gapnostic means accepting what is on this page.
What Gapnostic is
A workspace that helps you find out whether your research idea has already been done, make sense of the literature around it, and design a method you can defend. It searches real papers and shows you where every claim came from.
The one rule everything is built around
Gapnostic will not write your paper. Not a section, not a paragraph of your argument. That is deliberate and it is not going to change.
The thinking and the writing are the parts that make the work yours and make it defensible. A tool that does them for you is a tool that takes your name off your own research.
What it will do is the heavy lifting around that: the searching, the reading, the organising, the cross-checking.
Your work is yours
Everything you put into Gapnostic, and everything you make with it, belongs to you. We claim no ownership, no licence, and no right to publish or reuse any of it.
We do not use your research to train any model, improve any product, or demonstrate anything to anyone.
What you are responsible for
Gapnostic uses AI to read and summarise. AI gets things wrong, sometimes confidently. This is why every claim it makes is traced back to a real paper you can open and check.
Check the claims you intend to rely on. If Gapnostic says a paper found something, and that matters to your argument, open the paper. The tracing exists so that this takes seconds instead of hours, but it does not do it for you.
You are responsible for the accuracy of anything you submit, publish, or hand to a supervisor or examiner. A novelty assessment is a well-researched opinion about the published literature. It is not a guarantee that nobody anywhere has done your study.
You are also responsible for your own institution's rules. Many universities now require you to declare the use of AI tools. Check your policy, and declare it. Using Gapnostic is entirely compatible with honest scholarship, and hiding it is not.
Papers and copyright
Gapnostic finds papers through open scholarly databases, and fetches full text only where it is openly available. If you upload a PDF you obtained yourself, that is between you and however you obtained it, and you should have the right to use it.
Do not use Gapnostic to build or share a library of material you are not entitled to.
Your account
- One account is for one person. Please do not share your sign-in.
- Keep your password to yourself. Your workspace is private, and sharing the password gives that away.
- One person, one account. Sharing a workspace between people means neither of you has a private one.
- Tell us if you think someone else has got in.
Credits
AI costs real money, so every AI step (notes on search results, topic breakdowns, novelty assessments, screening, literature matrices, questions and methodology) uses credits from one wallet. One credit is one cent of AI spend. A new account receives 50 starter credits, once, when it confirms its email address. Searching for papers, reading, your Idea Vault and every download are free.
You see what a step will use before it runs, and you are charged what it actually used, which is never more than shown. If a step fails, nothing is charged. Credits do not expire. If you run out, nothing is lost: everything you have made stays exactly where it is, and reading, checking and downloading it cost nothing. Only new paid steps wait.
Paid plans are sold in US dollars. Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns.
A monthly or yearly plan renews until you cancel it, and cancelling stops future charges while keeping the time and credits already paid for. Refunds are explained on the refund policy page. If something went wrong with a payment, write to us and a person will sort it out.
If Gapnostic is charged for later, nobody will be billed without being told first and agreeing to it.
Things not to do
- Try to reach another researcher's workspace, or test whether you can.
- Automate or resell access, or run someone else's service on top of ours.
- Use it to produce work you will pass off as written by you when it was not, which the product is designed to prevent anyway.
- Attack, overload, or deliberately break the service.
If you find a security hole, please tell us rather than using it. We will thank you properly and we will not be difficult about it.
What we promise, and what we cannot
We will keep it running, back it up, fix what breaks, and tell you honestly when something has gone wrong.
We cannot promise it will never be down, never lose anything, or never be mistaken. This is early software run by a small team. Keep your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose, the same as you would with any single machine.
Our liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the problem. That is the standard clause and we are not going to dress it up. If we let you down badly, tell us, and we will try to make it right because that is how we want to run this.
Ending it
You can stop whenever you like, and ask us to delete everything. See the privacy page for how.
We can close an account that is being used to attack the service or to reach other people's work. Short of that, we will not close your account without telling you why and giving you time to get your work out.
If Gapnostic ever shuts down, you get at least 30 days' notice and your data in a format you can use. Nobody's thesis gets stranded because a company changed its plans.
The legal bits
Gapnostic is operated by Kairos Solutions. If these terms change, we will email everyone with an account before the change takes effect. Continuing to use it afterwards means accepting the new version.
If any part of this page turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
Talking to us
ruhu@gapnostic.com. A person reads it.