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What Is Cluely? An Honest Review of the “Undetectable” AI Assistant

Published 2 July 2026 · Updated 2 July 2026

Cluely is a desktop AI assistant that listens to your meetings in real time, transcribes what’s said, and shows AI-generated notes and answers in a floating overlay that only you can see. It never joins the call as a visible bot, and on its most expensive plan the overlay is hidden even from screen-sharing software — the “undetectability” that made it famous. It launched in April 2025 under the tagline “cheat on everything” and has since repositioned itself as an AI meeting note-taker.

This review covers what Cluely actually does, how it works under the hood, what it costs in 2026, and the controversies — a fabricated revenue figure, security research, brutal billing reviews — worth knowing before you pay for it. Everything here comes from Cluely’s own site, primary reporting and public records, checked on July 2, 2026. Full disclosure: we build SpeekSearch, a different kind of live AI copilot, so we’ll flag clearly where we’re an alternative — and where we’re not.

What Is Cluely?

As of July 2026, Cluely’s homepage pitches it as the “#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings”: it “takes perfect meeting notes and gives real-time answers, all while completely undetectable.” In practice it’s an overlay app for macOS and Windows (with an iOS app) that does three things during a call: live transcription and meeting notes, instant AI answers about whatever is being discussed, and recaps, meeting history and suggested follow-ups afterwards.

That pitch has travelled a long way from the original brand. Cluely broke out in 2025 as the “cheat on everything” tool — an invisible teleprompter for job interviews, sales calls, even dates. Today the cheating framing has been demoted rather than deleted: the company manifestostill closes with “So, start cheating. Because when everyone does, no one is.” — but the product is now sold as a meeting assistant, and the invisibility that made it notorious has become a paid add-on rather than the headline feature.

Cluely’s own marketing claims real-time transcription in 12+ languages, roughly 300 ms response times and 95% transcription accuracy. As we’ll see in the reviews section, independent user reports are considerably less flattering.

How Does Cluely Work?

Under the hood, Cluely combines three pieces:

• Screen reading (OCR).It reads what’s on your screen to build context about the meeting, the document, or the question in front of you.
• System-audio capture. It transcribes the call audio directly from your machine — which is why it never needs to join the meeting as a bot, and why nothing appears in the guest list.
• An LLM layer. Transcript plus screen context feed a large language model that generates notes, answers and suggested follow-up questions.

Results appear in a movable floating window only the user can see, and you can trigger an instant AI response with Cmd/Ctrl+Enter. You can also upload files and set custom instructions so answers draw on your own material.

The famous part is the stealth. On the Pro + Undetectability plan, Cluely says the overlay is rendered at the GPU level, making it invisible to screen-sharing and recording software in Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Notably, that page contains essentially no guidance about consent or appropriate use.

The Origin Story: Columbia, a16z and a Fabricated US$7M

Cluely was founded by Chungin “Roy” Lee and Neel Shanmugam, who met at Columbia University. In early 2025 Lee was suspended by Columbia over Interview Coder, an “invisible teleprompter” he built and used to pass an Amazon coding interview (the offer was rescinded). He dropped out, and in April 2025 the pair relaunched the idea as Cluely with a viral video of Lee using the AI on a date — under the tagline “cheat on everything.”

The rage-bait marketing worked. Cluely raised a US$5.3M seed round co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures, then a US$15M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2025, at a reported — never confirmed — post-money valuation of around US$120M.

Then came the episode that now defines the company’s credibility. In July 2025, Lee told TechCrunch that ARR had doubled in a week to US$7M after Cluely’s enterprise launch. On March 5, 2026, he publicly admitted the number was fabricated, calling it “the only blatantly dishonest thing I’ve said publicly online” and issuing a formal retraction. The real, Stripe-backed figures: roughly US$2.7M in consumer ARR and US$2.5M in enterprise ARR — a genuine multi-million-dollar business, just nothing like the hype.

There’s a security chapter too. In mid-2025, security researcher Jack Cable reverse-engineered the app and found a flaw that let any website opened through Cluely silently capture screenshots of the user’s screen, along with system prompts stored in plaintext. Cluely’s response — a DMCA takedown against his post rather than engagement — was widely criticised. A separate, widely repeated claim that a breach exposed 83,000 users’ data has never been confirmed by a major outlet or by Cluely; it circulates mainly on competitor blogs, so treat it as unverified. Cluely now runs a public bug-bounty program.

Cluely Pricing (Checked July 2026)

These are the prices shown on cluely.com/pricing as of July 2, 2026:

The striking line item: undetectability — the feature the whole brand was built on — is a US$130/month premiumover Pro. Annual billing exists, but exact annual rates aren’t displayed on the pricing page (third-party reporting puts Pro at around US$143.88/year — verify before relying on it).

Read the refund policy before subscribing: refunds are only available within 24 hours of purchase and require video evidencethat the software doesn’t work. Slow responses or getting detected are explicitly non-refundable.

Is Cluely Free?

Partly. The Starter plan is free and includes limited AI responses, limited notetaking, up to three file uploads and meeting history — enough to trial the concept. But the two things people actually come for — unlimited live answers and invisibility — are paid: US$19.99/month and US$149.99/month respectively. There is no free version of the undetectable overlay.

Is Cluely Safe? Is Cluely Legit?

Two different questions, two different answers.

Legit as a company? Yes.Cluely is a real, venture-backed startup with about US$20M raised, roughly 70 employees per Tracxn’s May 2026 count, open job listings and an active product roadmap. Despite a wave of “Cluely is dead” takes in late 2025, it was alive and shipping as of July 2026.

Safe to hand your card and your call audio to? That’s murkier. Three areas deserve attention:

• Billing and support.Mid-2026 reporting put Cluely’s Trustpilot rating around 1.8/5. The dominant complaints: users tapping “upgrade to yearly” in-app and reportedly being charged around US$500 instantly with no confirmation screen, refund requests handled by an AI support agent, and that 24-hour, video-evidence refund window doing exactly what it sounds like.
• Security track record.The Jack Cable research above is verified, and answering a security researcher with a DMCA takedown didn’t inspire confidence — though the company now operates a bug bounty.
• Consent and recording law.Cluely records call audio without joining the meeting, so other participants get no notice. In the roughly 13 US all-party-consent states (California, Illinois, Florida and others), recording without everyone’s consent can violate wiretap statutes — and the AI-notetaker category is being tested in federal court right now (Brewer v. Otter.ai, motion to dismiss heard May 2026). A tool designed to give no notice at all is arguably more exposed on this front, and the risk lands on the user, not the vendor.

Does Cluely Get Detected?

Technically, the top-tier overlay is invisible to screen-share and recording software, and no bot appears in the participant list. But “undetectable to Zoom” is not the same as undetectable, full stop:

• An anti-Cluely industry exists.Validia’s free tool Truely — dubbed “the anti-Cluely” — and Proctaroo both claim to detect Cluely-style assistants running on a candidate’s machine.
• Employers have policies. Amazon explicitly bans AI tools in job interviews and treats use as disqualifying — pointed, given Lee’s Amazon stunt started all of this. Anthropic bans AI in interviews unless the interviewer permits it. Google has no blanket ban.
• Humans notice. Reviewers report that the tells — eyes drifting to read an overlay, long pauses while an answer generates — are visible to any attentive interviewer, and there are anecdotal reports of candidates being caught.

Roy Lee’s own response to detection tools has been that detection is a losing game and Cluely will eventually move to hardware. Maybe. Today, using it somewhere it’s banned is a real risk you carry personally.

Cluely Reviews: The Honest Pros and Cons

Pulling together user reports from Trustpilot, Reddit and independent reviews, a consistent picture emerges.

What users like:

• Setup is fast, and the overlay concept genuinely works as a live notes-and-context tool
• Transcription quality is good when it works
• Some early reviewers say having context on screen made them feel more prepared on calls — though others argue the split attention hurts more than it helps

What they complain about:

• Latency:advertised at ~300 ms; testers report 5–10 second delays — an eternity mid-conversation
• Accuracy: hallucinated or generic answers; one Trustpilot reviewer put real-world transcription accuracy near 20% (a single anecdote, but a data point against the 95% claim)
• Stability: reports of the overlay freezing mid-interview and requiring a restart
• Billing: the surprise annual-charge pattern described above is the single most common complaint theme

The fair summary: the product is real and can be useful, but the gap between marketing claims and reported real-world performance is wide, and the billing experience is the worst-reviewed part of the company.

Cluely Alternatives

The right alternative depends on which Cluely you wanted — the meeting note-taker, the interview copilot, or the live research assistant:

A note on where we fit, since this is our blog: SpeekSearch is notan interview-answer overlay and won’t feed you responses while someone grills you. It’s for the other side of the mic — podcasters, journalists, researchers and hosts who want live transcription plus ambient research. When your guest name-drops a person, a paper or a company, a research card appears so you can follow up intelligently. It runs in the browser, captures nothing from your screen, and doesn’t hide from anyone.

Verdict: Does Cluely Actually Work?

Yes — with caveats stacked to the ceiling. Cluely is a real product from a real (if credibility-scarred) company, and as a live meeting-notes tool it can genuinely work. But the marketing has repeatedly outrun the truth, from the fabricated US$7M ARR to the 300 ms latency claim against 5–10 second reality, and the billing and refund experience draws the loudest complaints in its reviews. If you want meeting notes, transparent tools like Otter, Granola or tl;dv do the job for less money and less baggage. If you want the stealth overlay, understand you’re paying US$150/month for a feature that detection tools target, employers ban and wiretap law may reach.

And if what actually appeals is the live-AI-copilot idea — software that listens to a conversation and makes you smarter in the moment — without the cheating baggage, that’s literally what SpeekSearch is built for. You can try it free for 15 minutes — no stealth required.

Cluely FAQ

Pricing and product details were checked directly on cluely.com on July 2, 2026 and may have changed since. Company history is sourced from TechCrunch, a16z, Wikipedia and Cluely’s own pages, linked above. This article will be updated as the story develops.