What Sneaky Terms is and why we built it

Most contracts you sign were written by the side with more leverage. The landlord, the employer, the company. They wrote the contract to protect themselves, not to be fair to you. That is not unusual, and it is not against the rules. It just means the person signing starts at a disadvantage.

Sneaky Terms is a tool that helps close that gap. You upload a contract, and it reads every clause and tells you, in plain English, what each one means and whether it is fair. This is the story of why we built it and how it works.

Where this started

The problem was never that contracts are evil. The problem is that they are long, dense, and written in language built to be skimmed and signed. The clause that costs you the most is rarely the dramatic one. It is the one that looked normal and got skipped.

You cannot push back on a clause you did not notice. That single idea is why Sneaky Terms exists.

A lawyer is the right call for a high stakes deal. But you are not going to hire a lawyer to read your apartment lease, your gym membership, or a freelance gig worth a few hundred dollars. So most people sign those without really reading them. We thought that was unfair. Understanding what you are signing should be the default, not a luxury.

What Sneaky Terms does

You upload a contract as a PDF, a Word document, or pasted text. Sneaky Terms reads the whole thing and gives you three things back.

• A plain English translation of what each clause actually means.
• A fairness rating for each clause, so you can see at a glance what is standard and what is one-sided.
• The protections that are missing, meaning the things a fair version of this contract would include but yours does not.

It works on most agreements people actually sign, including leases, job offers, NDAs, freelance contracts, and more. If you want to see the process step by step, here is how it works.

The four levels

Every clause gets one of four ratings. They are the heart of how Sneaky Terms reads a contract.

• Clean. Fair and standard. Nothing to worry about.
• Watchful. Worth knowing about, but normal.
• Sneaky. One-sided in a way the other party is hoping you will not notice.
• Trap. A clause you should not sign until it changes.

The goal is not to make every contract look frightening. A fair clause is marked Clean and you move on. The point is to surface the few clauses that actually matter, and to tell you which side each one favours and why. Our guide through all of it is Freddie Fox, the slightly over-dressed fox who fronts the product and keeps a dry subject readable.

What Sneaky Terms is not

Sneaky Terms is not legal advice, and we are careful about that line. It tells you what a clause means and whether it is one-sided. What you do about it is your call. For anything serious, talk to a local lawyer.

We keep it honest in another way too. We do not tell you a clause breaks the law, because laws vary by country and that is not a call we are in a position to make. We tell you when something is one-sided or not standard, and when it is worth pushing back on. Laws vary by country. A local lawyer can tell you exactly where you stand.

Your documents stay private

People trust us with sensitive contracts, so privacy is built into how the product works rather than bolted on afterwards. Your contract is processed and deleted immediately. It is never saved to your account or retained in our system. Only your analysis results are stored, and only to your account.

In plain terms, we read your contract to analyse it, and then it is gone. We keep the findings so you can come back to them. We do not keep the document.

How to try it

The first scan of any contract is free and needs no sign up. You upload a contract and get a score, a short summary, and a sense of where the risks are. When you want the full breakdown, every clause read and rated with what you can do about each one, that runs on credits. New accounts start with a few free credits, and credits never expire.

If there is a contract sitting in your inbox right now that you have not really read, that is the one to start with.