Cluely vs Parakeet AI: Pricing, Privacy & Stealth Compared

Both tools do the same job. They listen to your interview and put an answer on screen before you have to open your mouth. What separates them is how you pay, and how honest each is about what stays hidden.

Every price here came from the vendors' own pricing endpoints on 21 August 2026. Neither renders prices into its HTML, which is why the "2026 pricing" articles in search results disagree with each other and with the checkout page.

The short version

Cluely is a subscription drifting away from interviews. It now brands itself an AI meeting notetaker, and charges separately to stay invisible: $19.99/month for Pro, $149.99/month for the tier that hides the window during screen share.

Parakeet AI is pay-per-interview. Credits never expire, one credit buys an hour, and stealth is not an upsell. It has also quietly rebranded from "AI Interview Assistant" to "AI Call Assistant."

Different bets. Cluely bets you are on calls constantly. Parakeet bets you are job-hunting for six weeks and then stopping.

Pricing, side by side

Cluely's figures are on its pricing page, where the annual column is JS-gated. Parakeet publishes no dollar figures on its public pricing section at all; the values above come from its own billing endpoint and plan catalog.

Two details change the maths.

The Parakeet prices you have read elsewhere are promo prices. Nearly every review quotes $29.50 / $59.00 / $88.50 for the 3, 8, and 15-credit packs. Those are exactly what the INTERVIEW50 code produces at 50% off. List is roughly double; the credit counts are still right.

Parakeet's monthly subscription is $149.90. Cluely's undetectability tier is $149.99. Go monthly on both and you pay within a dime of the same price for very different products.

Which one is cheaper for you

One credit is one hour. Sessions deduct 0.5 credits and run 30 minutes, then auto-extend for another 0.5 if you are still talking.

So a $59 pack is three hours of live help that sits in your account until you use it. Three one-hour interviews spread over two months costs $59 on Parakeet. On Cluely, with the window hidden, those same two months cost $299.98 monthly, or about $90 annualised.

The direction flips if interviews are not the point. Standups and client calls burn credits fast, and 15 credits at $177 is fifteen hours — five weeks of use at three hours a week. A subscription is the right shape for that pattern.

Stealth: both of them oversell it

Cluely gates invisibility behind its top tier, using the standard technique: the app marks its window as protected content so screen-capture APIs skip it. That mechanism has open questions: how well the content-protection flag Electron-style apps set holds against current macOS capture is an unresolved issue in Electron's own tracker. Cluely's own refund policy then names "detection by screen-sharing software" as a non-refundable complaint. You pay $149.99/month for hiding, and that specific failure is excluded.

Parakeet does not charge extra, but its marketing runs five badges including "Task Manager Invisible" — while its own FAQ says there is currently no way to change the ParakeetAI process name (pmodule) in Activity Monitor or Task Manager. Both sit on the same homepage. Any proctoring agent that enumerates processes sees the binary. The "Verified Undetectable — 8 of 8" widget beside it is static markup with a hardcoded "Checked just now" label, not a live scan.

Parakeet has also been retreating. Against its 13 May 2026 snapshot, two FAQ entries — "Can proctoring software detect ParakeetAI? No" and "Can I use ParakeetAI during an online exam? Yes" — are gone, and an employer blocklist program has appeared.

Privacy and data

Cluely records by design, and two of its documents carrying the same 10 June 2025 date contradict each other. The Privacy Policy says Cluely does not train on your data. The Terms of Service grants permission to use Free and Pro customer data to train its models. No-training is an Enterprise guarantee.

Parakeet's privacy policy was last updated 30 August 2024, older than its own March 2026 terms. Its data-category table marks call recordings as not collected — yet the dashboard has a "Save Transcript" toggle and a "View Transcript" action, and the policy contains no transcript-retention clause and no auto-deletion language. Retention is boilerplate: "as long as the user has an account with us." Input and output are shared with OpenAI and Speechmatics. There is no end-to-end encryption claim anywhere on the site, despite what some reviews assert.

Where Cluely is the better choice

• Your week is meetings, not interviews. The pivot to notetaking was a real product shift, and post-call notes suit recurring calls better.
• You want unlimited use for a flat number. Credits leave a meter running in your head mid-interview. A subscription does not.
• You need iOS. Cluely ships an App Store app. Parakeet is responsive web on mobile, by its own admission.

Where Parakeet AI is the better choice

• You are interviewing in a burst. $59 for three hours that never expire beats $149.99/month for a capability you need on four specific afternoons.
• You refuse to pay a stealth tax. Whatever hiding Parakeet does, it does on the $38 pack as well as the $177 one.
• You want to try before paying. Ten sessions of ten minutes, no card. Less than the marketing implies, but real.
• You are in a discounted region. Regional pricing covers a fixed EU country list and India, including native INR.

What neither of them does

• Neither survives a phone camera pointed at your screen, or a person in the room.
• Neither hides your eyes tracking to a different part of the display, or the pause before you read.
• Neither runs on Linux. Both stealth paths are Windows and macOS desktop only, and Parakeet's browser version hides nothing.
• Neither is permission. Proctoring vendors ship detection guides for both, and an employer's rules do not change because a vendor put a badge on a landing page.

Both have credibility wrinkles

Cluely's CEO admitted on 5 March 2026 that the $7M ARR figure he gave TechCrunch was fabricated; the real number was around $5.2M. Researcher Jack Cable separately found that one malicious link could invoke Cluely's screenshot handler and record a victim's screen continuously. Cluely filed a DMCA notice against his tweets, then retracted it — an employee had filed it without approval — and the CEO donated roughly $1,000 to the EFF at Cable's request. A researcher also reported a flaw affecting roughly 83,000 users and 23,000 interview transcripts, though that report's site is now offline and no mainstream outlet covered it.

Parakeet's wrinkles are quieter: a stale privacy policy, marketing stats no one can verify, a "Lifetime" plan live in the API but pulled from the public page, and a public bug board showing a model downgrade from Claude Sonnet to Haiku that users protested.

If you want a third option, GeekBye is a native desktop app built specifically for interviews rather than for meetings generally, with screen-share invisibility on every plan including the free one and no separate undetectability tier — there is no stealth upsell to price, because stealth is the product. We keep a wider list at the best Cluely alternatives that includes tools we do not sell.

Comparing more than these two? Start with the best Cluely alternatives, see how LockedIn AI stacks up against Cluely, or read the direct GeekBye vs Cluely breakdown.