Our story
I wanted to see what a model learned, not just what it predicted.
I'm Johnny Mobley. I started building systems for other people in 2000, when I was 16, and I've been doing it ever since. Along the way I automated most of my own work, and the tools I built for myself became these companies. Each one runs on rules I wrote down, not on paid AI calls, which is why it can cost so little.
Most machine-learning demos hand you a score and stop. ScalarFlux trains a plain logistic regression on a small table, either the classic Iris flower data or a CSV you upload, and shows the coefficients it learned next to its accuracy on rows it never saw. Nothing on the screen is a number I typed in ahead of time.
Next to it are two research tools built on OpenAlex's free index of published papers: one finds the most-cited work on a topic, the other counts papers per year so you can see whether a field is speeding up or slowing down. It's a starting point for scoping a topic, not a reading list I curated.
What works today
- Finds the most-cited published papers on a topic, with year, venue and whether each is open access
- Counts papers on a topic year by year and says whether research attention is growing or shrinking
- Trains a logistic regression live on the Iris data or your own small CSV and shows each feature's learned weight and the accuracy on held-out rows
What it doesn't do yet
Elicit still does things ScalarFlux doesn't:
- Summaries and answers drawn from the papers themselves.
- Chatting with a paper's full text.
- Pulling data out of many papers into a table for a systematic review.
- Importing from Zotero or exporting citations.
What it costs
| What you get | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Elicit Plus, billed yearly | Exports and more research-agent use on top of their free Basic plan, which already searches more than 138 million papers. | $11/user/mo |
| ScalarFlux | Everything above, no account needed. An optional $4 30-day pass adds longer results to the separate model search. | Free |
Elicit's price is from their pricing page as of October 29, 2026. Prices change, so check theirs before you compare.
Open ScalarFlux— Johnny