Three of us, one product, opinions about reading.

Aisummary is a small independent studio, based in Portland, Oregon. We started work on it in early 2025, in a shared office on the east side of the river, above a bakery that makes very good bread and sometimes a very loud espresso machine at eight in the morning. There is no parent company. There is no investor deck. There are three of us and one product, and we like it that way.

We built aisummary because we had a problem that we couldn't fix by trying harder. Between the three of us, we had something close to a thousand tabs open on any given Tuesday. Our read later folders were so full that they had stopped being about later and had become a kind of archive of good intentions. We were losing track of things we had genuinely wanted to read, and we were drowning in things we hadn't really meant to save.

The obvious thing to build was a summarizer. That was obvious in 2007 and it is still obvious now. What changed is that the underlying models finally write summaries that are actually useful — not robotic, not padded, not the same three sentences every time. The quality of the reading now justifies the tool, which it did not for a long time. We waited until it did.

What we care about

We care about the long tail of the web. The essay that took a year to write. The niche newsletter with six hundred subscribers. The research paper that changed a field. The piece that made you think. We do not particularly care about helping you skim a news cycle.

We care about keeping the surface area small. The app does one thing. We are not going to bolt on a chat interface. We are not going to add collaborative folders. We are not going to sell you a sharing feature. Every time we are tempted, we write the feature on a whiteboard and then we leave it on the whiteboard for a month. Usually we take it off.

We care about not being loud. No push notifications. No streak counter. No gamified library. aisummary is a reading tool, not an engagement product. If you don't open it for a week, we don't email you to ask why.

What we are not

We are not venture-backed. We may be, one day, but the product today is funded by the three of us, plus revenue from early Pro subscribers, and that is enough for what we are trying to do. We don't feel pressure to grow faster than we can read what we are shipping.

We are not trying to replace reading. We use aisummary to decide what is worth the full read, and then we go read those things. A lot of the time, the summary is enough. Sometimes it isn't, and that is the whole point of the source link we always return.

We are not an AI company. We use language models because they happen to be the right tool for this particular job. If the right tool changed tomorrow, we would change the tool. The product is the distillation, not the underlying model.

Where we work

Portland is deliberate. It is cheap enough to let us be patient. It is quiet enough to let us think. It is close enough to the Pacific to go swim when things get heavy, and close enough to the mountains to remember that most problems are smaller than they feel. None of us went to Stanford. We are not trying to raise a round. We are writing code, reading drafts, answering emails, and closing the laptop at six whenever we can.

How to reach us

The contact form is the best way. We answer in a day, sometimes two. If you have a real bug, label it bug. If you have a real idea, label it idea. If you just want to say hello, that is welcome too.

If you are writing about aisummary for a publication, the contact form works for that as well. We don't have a press kit. We have a logo and some screenshots and we will send them over.

The obvious question

People sometimes ask why we didn't call it something more clever. aisummary does what it says. It is a summary, produced by AI, and the domain has been around long enough that we inherited some goodwill with it. We didn't need a three-syllable made-up word to feel real. We needed a product that worked, and a name that got out of the way.

If you want to help

Use it. Tell us what's broken. Forward us the URLs we mangled. Pay us eight dollars a month if it saves you enough time to justify it. That is the whole contract.