Straight answers, each one a link you can send. Priced answers are checked against the code that actually charges, so nothing here can quietly go stale.
No. A chat assistant gives you a fluent paragraph and asks you to trust it. WorldbyFlow runs focused “scans” — each one a purpose-built piece of research that reads current news, public records, and trusted data sources, then returns a structured report: the same named parts every time, the sources listed at the end, and every individual fact marked with how well it is supported.
Yes, two ways. The signed-out front page is a live read-only preview — real, finished scans you can open and read with no account. And any scan someone shares with you as a public link opens in your browser, sources and all, with nothing to install or sign into.
The Start here group at the top of the scan menu. An Event Scan (what is happening and who is affected) or an Ask (a direct answer to any question) are the two most natural ways in. If you are not sure which format fits your question, the Scan Router picks one for you from a plain-English description.
A few minutes for most scans; the deepest research formats take longer. You never have to wait: close the tab, switch tasks, put your phone away — the finished report lands in your Workbench marked unread, and you can have up to five scans running at once.
Yes — the full product runs in a mobile browser, and you can add it to your home screen so it opens like an app. The bottom bar puts the Advisor, Watchboard, scan menu, Workbench, and Studio one thumb away.
Each scan has a fixed price in credits — most between 1 and 5 — always shown before anything runs. Standard is $10 a month for 20 credits. Premium is $25 a month for 60 credits. Pro is $50 a month for 125 credits. Studio is $100 a month for 275 credits. Every plan unlocks every scan type; plans differ in monthly allowance and in how many projects and portfolios you can keep, never in which research you get.
No. A free account has no monthly fee and no card required at signup — it is pay-as-you-go. Buy a one-off credit pack (5 credits for $5, 15 credits for $10, 25 credits for $15, or 100 credits for $50) whenever you need one, and every scan type is open to you while you hold credits.
Unused subscription credits roll forward month to month while your plan is active, for up to twelve months per batch, and your oldest credits are always spent first. Pack credits last twelve months from purchase. So a quiet month is never wasted — the credits wait for a busy one.
Your credits come back automatically — no support ticket, no asking. The one exception is a scan stopped for violating the content policy, which is not refunded.
Credit packs survive — they stay yours for their full twelve months, subscription or not. Banked subscription credits end with the plan, so spend those down before cancelling. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel any time from the account screen, and plan changes prorate fairly.
Every scan reads current news coverage via live web search and, where the subject calls for it, public records and official data — company filings, government statistics, court records, scientific publishing. It reads at run time, so the research reflects what is known today, and the sources it actually used are listed with every report as real links.
Every discrete fact a report surfaces carries a mark for how well it is supported — from confirmed against a named outside source, through grounded in material the scan actually read, down to contested between sources or honestly unverified. The grades are assigned by the software from what was actually retrieved; the writing cannot award itself a passing grade.
The report says so instead of quietly picking a side. The fact is marked as contested, both positions are kept with their sources, and the disagreement stays visible everywhere that fact appears. A question nobody has answered yet is different again — it is listed as an open question, never dressed up as a fact.
Yes — any research can be, and a tool that implies otherwise is selling something. That is exactly why every claim carries its grade: you can see which statements are well supported, which rest on a single source, and which are unverified — a lead to check, not a fact to repeat. Treat the top grades as load-bearing and the bottom ones as honest flags.
Precisely stated: the grades describe how well each claim was supported by what the research actually retrieved, and the paid checks — Deep Source Check on a whole report, Check this fact on a single claim — re-search claims against fresh, independent coverage with the verdicts assigned in code. None of that is an editorial guarantee, and public pages say so plainly: the judgment stays yours. What the product promises is that you can always see how well a claim is supported before you rely on it.
A FLOW badge — a quick sizing of the situation by organizational scale and decision complexity: roughly, is this routine, does it mainly need resources, does it need careful analysis before anyone acts, or is it genuinely major. It appears only on the formats where that judgment is meaningful, which is why some reports have one and others deliberately do not.
News Search is built on live search results that carry a 24-hour caching limit, so those results expire after a day — run the search again for fresh coverage. This is also why News Search results keep to a shorter list of export formats than other scans.
The report itself is a research aid; what you cite are the sources it hands you. Every scan lists the actual articles and records it used and exports its references in the formats reference managers expect — so the honest workflow is to follow the links, verify what you rely on, and cite the underlying sources with the export doing the formatting.
No. Handouts travel as read-only public links students open on any device — sources one tap away, nothing to sign into — or as PDFs for the print-and-photocopy world. Only the teacher running the research needs an account.
One thing, well: it adds a Create Lesson Plan action (3 credits) to every scan you run. The lesson — objectives, discussion questions, activities, materials — is built from that scan’s own sourced research rather than from a template. It is offered at signup and lives in settings afterwards.
Scans that repeatedly trip content-policy refusals can place an account under review as an anti-abuse measure. You can still read everything you have already run in the meantime; contact support to restore access.
All three were retired — WorldbyFlow is a research tool, not a news feed. What replaced them is stronger: the on-demand scan catalog, the Watchboard for standing signals you choose yourself, and scheduled standing orders for the briefs you actually want. Browse current coverage with News Search whenever you want it.
Wondering how it compares to a chat assistant or an aggregator? The field guide’s questions cover the positioning; this page covers the product.