Every SaaS has a Terms of Service. Nobody reads it.
I got burned by an auto-renewal clause I missed. Paid for a full year of a tool I'd stopped using 3 months in. When I went back to read the ToS, the clause was in paragraph 14, written in legal language that would take a lawyer to parse.
So I built Explain Legal, a Chrome extension that does it automatically.
How it works
When you land on a SaaS pricing page, the extension:
- Detects that you're on a pricing or checkout page
- Silently fetches the Terms of Service from the same domain
- Analyzes it with Claude (Anthropic's API)
- Surfaces the results in a sidebar — no clicking required
What it shows you
- A verdict: Safe, Caution, or Avoid
- Up to 3 red flags focused on financial risk (auto-renewal, non-refundable payments, price change rights)
- 2 questions to ask support before you commit
The technical stack
- Chrome Extension (Manifest V3, vanilla JS)
- Vercel serverless function as a proxy (keeps the API key server-side)
- Upstash Redis for usage tracking (freemium model — 3 free scans)
- Claude API for the analysis
- Stripe for payments
The interesting engineering problem
The hardest part wasn't the AI analysis, it was reliably finding and fetching the ToS page from any domain. Some sites link to /terms, others to /legal/terms-of-service, others bury it in the footer with non-standard anchor text.
The current approach: scan for anchor tags containing "terms", "tos", "legal", or "conditions" on the same domain, with a fallback to /terms. Works for ~85% of sites.
Try it
It's live on the Chrome Store: Explain Legal
3 free scans included.
Happy to answer questions about the build.
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