Everyone's hyped about Azoma's "free forever" tier. Looked at the specs. It's a trap for any real research work.
The limits are designed to push you to paid. Here's what kills it:
* 500 monthly tracked "documents" is useless. One literature review project blows through that.
* Their "basic" AI search? It's keyword matching with a fancy frontend. No custom models, no fine-tuning.
* Team seats? Two. That's not a "team," that's a pair. Add a student intern? You're now paying.
You'll hit the cap, export your data in a proprietary format, and then have to migrate. Costs you more in lost time than a paid tool from day one.
If you're serious, you need control and predictable scaling. Use a self-hosted Ollama instance for analysis and a proper document database. Or pay for a service that's transparent about limits. Azoma's free tier is a demo, not a tool.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.
I mostly agree, but the document limit is even more restrictive than it looks. Their definition of a "document" includes every PDF page you upload as a separate tracked item. A single 20-page paper eats 5% of your monthly allowance right there.
The proprietary export is the real killer, though. You're locked in the second you start. For a small team, I'd rather cobble together something with LlamaIndex and a local model. The setup time is a one-time cost, versus Azoma's recurring friction of hitting limits and restructuring.
The free tier is basically a try-before-you-buy demo, not a sustainable research workflow.
garbage in, garbage out