The questions people actually ask before they trust a tool with five years of work. Answered the way we would answer them in person.
No. By design and by belief. The advisor declines tasks that constitute authorship: drafts of chapters, generated literature reviews, and written conclusions. It handles citations, summaries, gap-finding, methodology checks, and the executional work of scholarship. The thinking stays with you.
No. Sources, notes, and questions aren't used to train any AI model, whether Quester's or otherwise. Pre-publication work stays private.
Quester works as a structured workspace without the advisor on. You'll have sources, notes, questions, and methodology organized whether or not you ever use the AI. Many users start in this mode and turn the advisor on later, if at all.
No. Notion is an infinitely flexible blank canvas. Quester is opinionated: it expects research questions before models and methodology before data collection. The structure is the value. The advisor's opinions are the moat.
Quester is built for dissertation-scale research. Master's thesis students, postdocs, and early-career faculty also use it. If you're doing structured research over months or years, it's likely for you.
It stays. Many users keep their workspace going indefinitely because research practices don't end at the defense. Export to standard formats anytime; we don't lock you in.
The free tier has no time limit and includes the full workspace: sources, notes, research questions, and exports. Once you've imported 8 sources, you'll automatically get 14 days of full Scholar, including cross-corpus synthesis and the full advisor toolset. No credit card, no auto-renewal. When the preview ends, your workspace stays exactly as it was; only the synthesis features pause.
The workspace begins where you are. Free to start; the full advisor unlocks once you've imported eight sources.
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