Stria vs Settled: a cited clause, then what

Stria vs Settled at a glance

Stria — Scope, sign-off and billing as one record — every client request judged against a locked baseline, and a tamper-evident approval you can export.

Settled — A very low-cost scope analyser. Intake is an uploaded SOW plus the pasted client message; a founding lifetime deal was on offer at our verification date.

The short version

Settled is the better buy on price alone — a few dollars a month, or a one-off lifetime figure under sixty. Analyses are capped at thirty a month on both. Its site does not describe e-signature or invoicing, so the output is an answer you act on yourself. Stria costs more and turns the answer into a signed change order and a paid invoice.

Settled figures were read from their own pricing page on 2026-09-01 and are re-checked on a 120-day cycle. Prices move — confirm current terms before deciding. Settled pricing

Choose Stria if

You want the paperwork handled — the change order, the signature, the invoice — rather than only the verdict.

Choose Settled if

You want the cheapest possible second opinion on client requests and will handle the paperwork yourself.

All comparisons

Settled is the 2026 paste-the-message tool priced for people who do not want a stack. We

fetched the live page, including /pricing. Here is the useful version, including the case

where nine dollars a month is the correct purchase.

The short answer

Settled answers one question, with the clause attached. Upload a SOW — PDF, Word, even a

scan — paste the client message, get in-scope / out-of-scope / ambiguous, plus the contract

sentence and a drafted reply. Thirty analyses a month, unlimited projects. Founding lifetime

access is $59 once; otherwise $9 a month, or $89 a year, with a 14-day trial.

Stria keeps the answer. The verdict is one step in a record: the locked scope version,

the priced change order, the revision round, the invoice. Detection does not wait for you to

open a paste box.

If you have a handful of awkward emails a month and a contract you already like, Settled is

the cheaper specialised buy. If the extras never got pasted, a better paste box will not

notice them.

Where Settled is the better choice

• It is cheaper, including a lifetime option. $9 a month, or $59 once for founding

members. Stria opens at $19. For a solo who will not adopt a system of record, that

arithmetic is not close.

• Ambiguous is an honest third state. When the request is not clearly in or out,

Settled says so and drafts negotiation language instead of a shutdown. Plenty of tools in

this category fake certainty. This one does not, on the page we read.

• It parses ugly contracts. Scanned documents, multi-column layouts, Word, PDF. No

manual markup. If your SOW is a photographed PDF from 2019, that is a real intake

advantage.

• The reply is contextual, not a template. Their own FAQ asks whether the emails sound

like a robot and answers that each one references the specific clause. You still edit

before sending, which is the correct disclaimer.

• No team pricing theatre. "Priced for independent workers, not teams." If you are one

person, that is a relief rather than a limitation.

• A fourteen-day trial with no card. That is a trial, not a free tier, and it is still

the lowest-friction way to see whether the citations match your contracts.

Where Stria is the better choice

1. A paste box only runs when you open it

Settled's flow is: the client asks, you paste, you send. That is the right design for an

analyser. The extras that cost the most did not look like extras, so they were never

pasted. Stria detects an out-of-scope request inside forwarded client email, with no

mailbox to connect, and watches a selected Slack channel without workspace-wide message

access. It determines scope on every client comment, not only the ones you already

suspected.

2. Thirty analyses is a meter

Both the lifetime deal and the subscription cap at 30 analyses a month. A bad month is

exactly when you hit a cap. Stria's paid rungs are priced by seats, not by how much scope

creep you had.

3. A cited email is not a signed extra, and a signed extra is not cash

Settled drafts the response. What happens next is outside the tool: the client replies

somewhere, you maybe remember to change-order it, you maybe invoice. Stria captures

email-verified sign-off, supersedes the scope with a new version, issues the invoice,

collects on your own Stripe with no platform fee, and syncs with Xero or QuickBooks

Online, one ledger at a time.

4. The free check is the like-for-like

If your reason for choosing Settled is "I want to try this without committing," Stria's

no-account check costs nothing and returns a verdict with one verbatim citation from the

excerpt you pasted. Settled's trial is fourteen days after signup. Different doors.

5. Price, stated fairly

Read from each vendor's own site on 1 September 2026:

Nine dollars a month is not nine dollars once. A table that compared it to ScopeGuard

AI's one-time nine dollars would be mixing two billing shapes, and we are not going to.

Feature comparison

"Not stated" means their site does not describe it either way.

How to decide in ten minutes

1. **How many times last year did you already know it was extra, and just needed the

sentence?** If that is most of the pain, buy the cheaper writer of sentences.

1. How many extras did you only notice while adding up hours? That is a detection

problem. Pasting would have required the awareness you did not have.

1. Did the extra get invoiced? If the answer is usually no, an email draft is not the

missing piece.

Moving over

There is nothing to import from a scope tool, so this is the easy part — what you carry over is

your client book, not your scope history.

Import clients, projects and unpaid invoices from a CSV export — HoneyBook, Bonsai, Dubsado or a

spreadsheet. Columns are matched by name where we recognise them, split first and last name

columns are joined, and anything we cannot place is listed for you to point at a field before a

single row is written. The preview tells you how many clients are new and how much is already

past due.

Where to start

Stria is open. The free plan carries three clients and six deliverables a month and needs no card,

which is enough to put a real project through before deciding.

Start your 14-day trial, or try it with no account at all: the

free scope check needs no signup and

saves nothing. The live demo shows what the client sees.

Useful alongside this comparison whichever tool you choose:

what scope creep actually looks like,

how to tell a client a request is out of scope,

the change order template clients sign, and

scope creep software in 2026.

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*Settled pricing, trial terms and feature descriptions were read from the vendor's own site at

allsettled.app on 1 September 2026. The 89-dollar yearly

figure is published in the pricing page's meta description; the on-page yearly toggle did not

render a different amount in the HTML we fetched. Vendors reprice and change terms — verify current pricing and features on Settled's own site before deciding. Stria figures are from our

published pricing. Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.*

Related reading

• What is scope creep for freelancers?
• How to tell a client it's out of scope
• Freelance change order template
• Stria vs ScopeLock: scope tool or system of record
• Stria vs ScopeFence: the closest comparison here

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