Humanpen vs Shortwave

Pay-as-you-go one-time credit packs, USD, no subscription: 1,000 credits $19, 5,000 $79 (most popular), 10,000 $149, 20,000 $249; a once-per-account first purchase of the same four packs at $9.90 / $49 / $98 / $196; 100 free credits at signup; credits never expire and work in the app and the API. Consumption: 100 credits per 1,000 words rewritten by the humanizer, 5 credits per 1,000 words for citation-format correction. Verified on three surfaces that agree - the rendered /pricing page (four cards, first-purchase prices shown beside list prices), the site's own public endpoint /api/backend/v1/credits/packages?locale=en (eight items: four 'first_*' packs at the discounted cents values and four standard packs at 1900/7900/14900/24900 cents, currency USD, every provider 'waffo', default_provider 'waffo', first_purchase_available true, no recurring flag on any item), and the pricing page metadata ('1,000 credits for $19, or $9.90 on your first purchase'). The Terms state each purchase is a one-time charge and the only mention of a recurring plan is a future conditional ('Credits granted by a future membership plan would expire at the end of each period') in the pricing FAQ, so no subscription price exists to verify and none was recorded.

submitted via form by vendor; editorial entry written independently. Received through FormSubmit twice on 2026-10-23 21:35 UTC with a byte-identical payload (INBOX msgs 201 and 202 / All Mail 496 and 497) - one submission, not two; the timestamps carry minute resolution only. Submitted contact nitubag316@gmail.com differs from the support@humanpen.net the site publishes; 'HumanPen' had zero hits in the repo, the hold ledger or any mail folder and no prior outbound mail existed to either address. The site is a Next.js SPA, so much of it is client-rendered: /privacy, /terms, /contact, /affiliates and a dozen other guesses return the identical 56,457-byte app shell and are not the legal pages - the real ones are /legal/privacy and /legal/terms (both in the sitemap, both 200 when rendered) and both are dated 'Last updated: 7 September 2026'. Pricing was read from the rendered page AND from the site's own public packages endpoint; the pack cards do not exist in the served HTML at all, so a markup-only price sweep finds just the $19/$9.90 figures in the meta description and would have under-reported the ladder. Privacy policy contents verified by rendering: processors named as Creem and Waffo Pancake (merchant of record, card data never stored), an unnamed authentication provider, an unnamed cloud object-storage provider and unnamed third-party AI model providers; retention 7 days for uploaded documents and results, 30 days for account deletion, 7 years for payment records; no sale of personal data and no training use. Terms verified: user retains rights to input and output, 16+ eligibility, refunds of untouched purchases within 14 days, credits auto-returned on a failed job, acceptable-use clause that explicitly bars academic dishonesty, indemnification, liability capped at three months of payments, and a governing-law clause that names no jurisdiction ('the laws of the jurisdiction in which the HumanPen team operates'). Tracker finding verified from the served HTML and the live network, not from policy text: the root layout injects googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=AW-18511954133 and a Microsoft Ads UET loader for bat.bing.net/bat.js, both with next/script strategy 'lazyOnload'; loading /legal/privacy produced requests to googletagmanager.com, googleadservices pagead/viewthroughconversion/18511954133, google.com/rmkt/collect/18511954133 and bat.bing.com/action, and the page contains no cookie/consent UI element and no consent-mode call. Privacy section 10 says the only cookies are those 'necessary to sign you in and keep the Service working' and 'We do not use them to build advertising profiles', and section 5 names no Google or Microsoft processor. Operator identity: none. 'HumanPen' / 'the HumanPen team' is the only party named on any page; no company, individual, country, postal address or company number appears, and the About page explicitly declines to give a biography. Contact route verified before any reliance on it: SMTP RCPT TO against the domain's own Cloudflare MX (route1/route2.mx.cloudflare.net) returned 250 2.1.0 Ok for support@humanpen.net and 550 5.1.1 Address does not exist for a random local part, so the mailbox is live and the domain is not a catch-all. Domain: RDAP registration 2026-07-17T06:52:45Z, registrar Namecheap, NS elaine/rajeev.ns.cloudflare.com, Cloudflare Email Routing MX. No affiliate or partner page is public - /affiliates and /partners both render the sign-in screen - so no tracking URL exists and none was invented. Name checked: no famous research project, open-source repo or incumbent AI product trades as HumanPen; the product's own footprint is a GitHub org (humanpen) with ai-humanizer-comparison, humanpen-skill and humanpen-mcp, an aicatalog.app directory review, a Hugging Face space and a twelve.tools badge. Documented API defect recorded: GET /v1/health and GET /v1/ready are in the vendor's OpenAPI 3.1 schema and both return 404 on the live API. Category reclassified from the submitted 'Writing & Productivity' to Productivity, which is where this catalog keeps writing/document tools.

Business is $30/seat/month, Premier is $45/seat/month, and Max is $120/seat/month. Business includes standard intelligence (Claude Sonnet 4.6), roughly 150-300 AI requests/day, 5 years AI search history, 50 threads per AI search, 3 AI filters, and AI integrations. Premier adds advanced intelligence, 2x AI usage, unlimited AI search history, 100 threads per search, and 10 AI filters. Max adds expert intelligence (Claude Opus 4.6), 6x AI usage, 150 threads per search, and 50 AI filters. A 14-day free trial is advertised; no permanent free plan is listed on the pricing page.

Official pricing page checked 2026-09-01. Terms of Service last updated January 26, 2023; Privacy Policy last updated July 10, 2025. Terms state users own their User Content and grant Shortwave operational rights. Shortwave integrates with a sister product, Tasklet, for 24/7 workflow automation. The pricing page does not list a permanent free plan; only a 14-day free trial is advertised.