Article 1 September 2026
Do you need an account to use Gistil? Mostly, no
The rule is one sentence: reading is open, and asking for new work is not. Everything below is why that line falls where it does.
Measured across 3,486 videos last recalculated 2 Sep 2026 4 min read
The short answer: reading a measurement takes no account. Asking for a new one does.
That line is not a growth tactic and it is not arbitrary. It falls exactly where our costs fall, and it is worth explaining, because a paywall whose logic you cannot see is indistinguishable from one that was put wherever it would hurt most.
3,486 Videos already measured, across 15 subjects. Every one of them is readable without signing in to anything.
What works with no account at all
Every video we have already measured. If a video is in the library, its verdict, its density, its padding share and the point where it starts delivering are all readable, and nothing asks you to identify yourself first.
Everything published on this site. The shelves, the reports and every article, including this one.
That is the large majority of what people actually do. The library holds 3,486 measured videos and grows continuously, and a measurement is not consumed by being read — the hundredth person to open a video sees the same reading as the first, at no additional cost to us and none to them.
What needs an account
A video nobody has asked us about yet. Measuring a video that is not in the library is work, and work that has a cost attached each time it is done. It is the one operation on the whole product that is not free to repeat, which makes it the only sensible place to put a boundary.
A signed-in account comes with a one-time allowance of new videos it can have measured — granted once per person, not refilled every month. Beyond that there are paid plans; the current allowances and prices live on the pricing page rather than here, so that a price change does not leave a stale number in an article.
Why the free allowance is one-time rather than monthly
A monthly free allowance has an obvious exploit: delete the account, make a new one, start again. At the scale of one person that is a nuisance. At the scale of a library it is a bill somebody has to pay, and that somebody is us.
So the allowance is granted once per person and the record of it outlives the account. When you delete an account we delete your data; what stays behind is a one-way digest of your sign-in identity — not an address, and not something that can be turned back into one — together with how much of the one-time allowance had already been used. Sign up again and you return to the allowance you had left rather than a new one.
We would rather say that plainly than describe the deletion as total and quietly keep the row. It is set out in the same terms on the account deletion page and in the privacy policy, and it is the only thing about a person that outlives their account.
Why a measurement someone else paid for is free to you
Because the alternative is worse for everybody, including us.
A video costs something to measure once. After that, showing the result again costs effectively nothing. Charging the second reader for work that was already done would mean the library gets smaller and slower the more it is used, which is the opposite of how a library should behave.
So the rule is the one that matches the economics: the first person to ask for a video spends part of an allowance; everybody after them reads it free, and it does not count against anyone’s limit. A paid plan buys the ability to keep adding new videos, not the ability to look at old ones.
What signing in does not get you
It does not change the numbers. There is no version of a measurement that only account holders see. The verdict, the density, the padding share and the starting point are the same reading for everyone.
It does not unlock a different library. The shelves on this site show the same measurements the product does.
It is not required to leave. Deleting the account is a page, not an email exchange.
The honest summary
If you use Gistil to check videos other people have already looked at, you will probably never be asked for anything. If you use it to open up videos at the edge of the library — new uploads, niche subjects, the things nobody else has asked about — you will reach the line quickly, because that is precisely the use that costs money to serve.
Which of those you are is not something we can tell in advance, and it is why the free allowance exists at all: it is enough to find out.
Questions people ask
Do you need an account to use Gistil?
Not to read a video we have already measured — that works with no sign-in. Asking us to measure a video nobody has asked for yet needs an account, because it is work that costs something to do.
Is there a free tier?
Yes. A signed-in account comes with a one-time allowance of new videos it can have measured. It is granted once per person rather than refilled monthly, and the current numbers are on the pricing page.
Does a video someone else asked for cost me anything?
No. Once a video has been measured, the measurement is open to everyone and it does not come out of anybody's allowance.
What happens to the allowance if I delete my account?
Deleting your account removes your data. What is kept is a one-way digest of your sign-in identity that cannot be turned back into an address, together with how much of the one-time allowance had been used — so that signing up again returns you to the allowance you had left rather than a new one. This is stated in full on the account deletion page.
Do I need an account for the shelves on this site?
No. Everything published here is open, with no sign-in of any kind.