Why We Built 5tldr: Our Story

The Problem We All Face

Every morning, I wake up to hundreds of unread emails, dozens of Slack messages, a Twitter feed that never stops scrolling, and a reading list that grows faster than I can ever hope to read.

Sound familiar?

We live in an incredible time. More knowledge is being created and shared than ever before in human history. But there's a cruel irony: the more information we have access to, the harder it becomes to find what actually matters.

I used to spend hours every day just trying to keep up. Reading articles that turned out to be fluff. Watching hour-long videos for 5 minutes of insight. Scrolling through endless feeds, feeling busy but not actually learning anything useful.

It was exhausting. And I knew I wasn't alone.

Why We Built 5tldr

We built 5tldr because we believe your time is precious.

Not because we wanted to help you consume more content faster. Not because we think AI should replace human thinking. But because we believe that the best use of your time is thinking deeply about things that matter — not wading through noise to find them.

Here's our simple philosophy:

5 bullet points. That's it.

Why 5? Because if something can't be distilled into 5 key points, either it's too complex for a summary (and you should read the original), or it's too fluffy to be worth your time.

We're not trying to replace reading. We're trying to help you decide what's worth reading.

What We're Not

We're not trying to:

Turn you into a content consumption machine

Replace deep reading and thinking

Summarize everything into meaningless soundbites

Collect your data or sell you subscriptions you don't need

What We Are

We're a small team who got tired of information overload and decided to do something about it.

We made 5tldr free because we believe everyone deserves access to tools that respect their time. No sign-up walls. No credit card required. No "free tier" that's actually useless.

Just paste, click, and get the key points.

Our Promise

We promise to:

Keep it simple. 5 bullet points. No feature bloat.

Keep it fast. Your summary in seconds, not minutes.

Keep it free. The core tool will always be free.

Keep it honest. We'll never pretend AI summaries replace real understanding.

A Personal Note

I still read books cover to cover. I still watch long-form content when it's worth it. I still have deep conversations that can't be summarized.

But for the 90% of content that's just noise? I use 5tldr to quickly find the signal.

I hope it helps you too.

Thank you for being here.

— The 5tldr Team