AI assistants and search decision
Askee
A competent technical user can build and operate a minimal replacement in a few weeks; key components (UI, parsers, transcript extraction, RAG) are implementable and prior-art projects demonstrate the core capabilities, so keep paying only if you value the polished shipped product and ongoing maintenance.
Visit website↗Built by Michael, who ships 5 products in this index
$6.99/mo
$84/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off50 h to build
$20/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Askee alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Capture page or document content (including video transcripts and screenshots), build context-aware queries, call an LLM with retrieved context, render answers with source links in a side panel widget.
What it still won’t have
- Polish and cross-browser robustness of a shipped extension (edge cases, UX polish)
- Priority access to new features and ongoing product improvements
- Enterprise-grade search/web-search integration and continuous updates
- Scale operations (if many users), analytics, and paid-subscription management
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a Chrome extension (Manifest V3) with a React side-panel UI and Node.js server for optional proxying of LLM calls. Core features in scope: content-script extraction of page DOM and user selection, YouTube transcript extraction and timestamp mapping, upload & parse PDF/DOCX/CSV/JSON files, drag-select screenshot capture with OCR, context retrieval that maps answer spans back to source locations, LLM API integration (configurable OpenAI-compatible endpoint), conversation history persisted in browser storage, and in-extension subscription check. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing portal, analytics dashboard, and cross-browser packaging beyond Chromium. Include error handling, unit tests for parsers and retrieval mapping, and end-to-end tests for the extension install and basic Q&A flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAskee homepage
- official pricingAskee pricing section (homepage)
- open sourcehangwin/mcp-chrome
- open sourceszczyglis-dev/py-gpt
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
