Common questions

The free tier includes 1 project, 50 documents, 500 MB of storage, 2,000 queries per month, and 25 research credits per month. Research at quick and balanced depth is available. No credit card required.

Free projects are suspended after 90 days of inactivity. Your data is retained; the project is simply paused until you return.

Research credits are consumed by /research requests based on depth: quick costs 0.5 credits, balanced costs 1 credit. deep and exhaustive depth require BYOK and consume no credits. You pay your model provider directly.

Credits reset at the start of each billing cycle and do not roll over.

BYOK (bring your own key) lets you connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini API key to Dewey. When a BYOK key is configured, Dewey uses it for all research requests, including deep and exhaustive depth, which are otherwise unavailable. No research credits are consumed, and Dewey adds no markup on generation. You pay your provider at cost.

At exhaustive depth with Claude Opus 4.6, Dewey achieved 83.7% accuracy on FinanceBench. The typical per-question cost in API tokens for that run was a few cents. See the study.

By default, requests that exceed your monthly query or document limit return a 429 with an upgrade prompt. Overages are opt-in per project: if you enable them, additional documents cost $0.02 each and additional queries cost $1.00 per 1,000 (Pro and Team).

Yes. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time from your project settings. Upgrades take effect immediately. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at the end of the current billing period.

The free tier is the trial. It gives you real access to the API, real retrieval, and quick and balanced research depth at no cost. Upgrade to Pro when you need BYOK, exhaustive depth, or more documents.

Annual billing is available for Pro and Team plans. Contact hello@meetdewey.com to set it up.

PDF, DOCX, HTML, Markdown, and plain text. More formats are added regularly. If you have a specific format you need, let us know.

A typical 10-page PDF is fully processed and ready to query in under a minute. Large documents, image-heavy PDFs, or PDFs with complex tables take longer, particularly if AI captioning is enabled.

You can subscribe to real-time status events via SSE to know exactly when a document is ready, without polling.

At Pro and above, Dewey can run a vision model over images, figures, and diagrams embedded in your documents to generate text descriptions, and an LLM over tables to generate structured captions. Both are indexed as searchable chunks alongside the document text.

This makes charts, graphs, and tabular data fully retrievable by semantic search, not just the text that surrounds them. Captioning requires a BYOK key.

Yes. Send a DELETE /v1/documents/:id request and the document, its chunks, embeddings, and section summaries are permanently removed. Deletion is immediate and irreversible.

/query is a single-pass hybrid search: it retrieves the most relevant chunks for a query and returns them ranked, with document and section provenance. It is fast and predictable.

/research runs a multi-step agentic loop. The model issues multiple search calls, reads results, decides whether to dig further, and synthesizes a final cited answer in Markdown. It is slower but can answer questions that require finding and combining information from multiple locations in a corpus.

Depth controls how many tool calls the research agent can make before producing its answer:

• quick : 1 to 3 searches. Best for targeted factual lookups.
• balanced : up to 10 searches. The default for most Q&A and agent workflows.
• deep : up to 25 searches. For synthesis across large or multi-document corpora. Requires Pro + BYOK.
• exhaustive : up to 50 searches. For multi-hop reasoning, complex analysis, and full corpus traversal. Requires Pro + BYOK.

Yes. Every /research response includes a sources array listing the document, section, and chunk each part of the answer was drawn from. Citations are not optional and cannot be disabled.

At Pro and above, you can use any model from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini via your own API key. Pass the model identifier in the model field of the request. Dewey manages the tool loop and context assembly; the model provides the reasoning.

Documents, embeddings, and metadata are stored on US-based infrastructure. Enterprise plans include a private deployment option if you need data residency in a specific region or a dedicated environment.

Yes. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit. All API traffic uses TLS 1.2 or higher.

No. Your documents are used only to serve your queries. They are never used to train Dewey models or shared with any third party.

Individual documents can be deleted via the DELETE /v1/documents/:id endpoint. Entire collections can be deleted via DELETE /v1/collections/:id, which removes all documents, embeddings, and metadata in the collection. For bulk export, contact hello@meetdewey.com.

A DPA is available for Enterprise customers. Contact enterprise@meetdewey.com to request one.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for exposing tools to AI assistants. The Dewey MCP server makes your document collections available as tools inside Claude, Cursor, and any other MCP-compatible agent with no custom integration required.

Install with npx @meetdewey/mcp and point it at your collection. Your documents become searchable from within the assistant immediately.

Yes. Official client libraries are available for TypeScript and Python. Both wrap the REST API and handle authentication, retries, and SSE streaming.

https://api.meetdewey.com/v1. Full reference documentation is at meetdewey.com/docs.

Rate limits are based on your plan's monthly query and document quotas. There are no per-second or per-minute burst limits under normal usage. If you need higher throughput for a batch workload, contact us.