TL;DR: Humata lets you upload documents and ask questions about them in plain English, with answers that link back to the source passage. The free plan covers 60 pages a month for one user with basic features — and Humata’s homepage puts the free answer allowance at up to 10 answers, so treat free as a tasting menu, not a workhorse. For one paper, contract, or report a month, it’s a genuinely useful $0 tool. Regular document work will push you to Expert at $9.99/month.
What is Humata?
Humata is a document-chat AI — often described as “ChatGPT for your PDFs.” You upload files (research papers, contracts, manuals, reports), and instead of reading linearly, you ask questions: “What does this agreement say about termination?”, “Summarize the methodology,” “Compare the pricing tables in these two proposals.” Humata answers from your files and attaches cited links into the source material, so you can click through and verify the passage yourself rather than trusting the summary blind.
That citation habit is the product’s strongest idea. Document AI is only useful if you can check it, and Humata is built around checking it.
What is actually free on Humata?
- 60 pages per month of document processing on the free plan, per Humata’s pricing page.
- 1 user with the basic feature set — upload, ask, summarize, compare.
- Up to 10 answers on the free tier, per Humata’s homepage — the tighter of the two limits, and the one most people will hit first.
- Cited answers — the links back to source passages are part of the core product, not a paid extra.
What is paywalled?
Expert ($9.99/month) raises the allowance to 500 pages a month and up to 3 people, with extra pages billed per page beyond that. Team ($49 per user/month) jumps to 5,000 pages and adds the features organizations actually need: OCR for scanned documents and images, department- and folder-level permissions, and response personalization. Enterprise adds formal security packaging. Notice the pattern: free and Expert are about volume; Team is where document control lives.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Citations on answers make verification fast — the right design for document AI
- Free plan handles a real document, not a toy sample
- Asking across and comparing multiple files beats re-reading PDFs
- Simple enough for non-technical users: upload, ask, check the citation
Cons
- The free answer allowance (up to 10) runs out long before the 60 pages do
- OCR for scanned documents is a Team-tier feature, not free
- Page-based metering punishes long documents — a 200-page manual eats months of free allowance at once
Who is Humata’s free plan best for?
Students working through one paper at a time, professionals who occasionally need the key clauses out of a contract or the findings out of a report, and anyone evaluating document-chat tools before paying. If documents are your daily work — legal review, research literature, compliance files — budget for Expert or Team and treat the free plan as the trial that proves the workflow.
Bottom line: Humata free is small but real: 60 pages and a handful of cited answers a month. Use it on the one document that matters most, verify the citations, and you’ll know within ten minutes whether the paid tiers earn their money.
Frequently asked questions
Is Humata free to use?
Yes. The Free plan is $0 with 60 pages a month, one user, and basic features; Humata’s homepage lists up to 10 answers on the free tier.
How many pages can I upload for free?
60 pages per month. A single long document can consume the whole month’s allowance, so check page counts before uploading.
Does Humata show where its answers come from?
Yes — answers include cited links back to the source passage in your files, so you can verify them in context.
Can Humata read scanned documents for free?
OCR for scanned text is listed as a Team-plan feature, so scanned documents are a paid-tier use case.