Cluely vs Interview Coder (2026): Same Stunt, Compared

If you have searched “Cluely vs Interview Coder,” you have probably noticed the two products feel oddly related — similar undetectability language, similar founder mythology, similar corner of the internet. There is a reason for that. Both trace back to the same person and the same very public stunt at Columbia University in early 2025.

We build a competing interview copilot, so read this as an interested party. But our whole positioning is that we do not overstate things, so this page sticks to what is documented and labels everything else. We will lay out the shared origin story from mainstream sources, then referee the two products as they exist today — because in 2026 they are not the same kind of tool at all. One walked away from interviews entirely. One stayed — and charges $299 a month for it.

Prices below were read directly from each vendor’s own site on 2026-07-12. Treat all pricing as “as of July 2026” — these companies change numbers often.

The short version

	Cluely	Interview Coder
Positioning today	”#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings” (cluely.com)	“The No. 1 Undetectable AI For Interviews” (interviewcoder.co)
Scope	General meetings/notes + live AI	Markets every interview type; coding-solution workflow at its core
Entry paid price	$19.99/mo (Pro)	$299/mo
Stealth cost	Extra: $149.99/mo (Pro + Undetectability)	Included in the subscription
Ceiling	$149.99/mo	$799 one-time (lifetime)
Free tier	Free Starter, $0	Free download (app only, no AI)
Form factor	Desktop (macOS 10.15+, Win 11) + iOS	Desktop (Windows + macOS)
Stealth claim	”Invisible to screen share” (paid tier)	“100% undetectability” / “Zero documented cases”

Sources for the table: Cluely pricing, Cluely download, Interview Coder homepage (all accessed 2026-07-12). Everything in this table is first-party — read from each company’s own live site.

The shared origin: one stunt, on the record

This part is well documented, so we can state it plainly.

In early 2025, Columbia student Chungin “Roy” Lee built Interview Coder — a tool that screenshots a coding test and asks an AI to solve it. His own summary, quoted by Gizmodo: “You take a picture, and then you ask ChatGPT, ‘Hey can you solve the problem in this picture?’ Literally, that’s the entire product.”

Lee said he landed offers from Amazon, Meta, and TikTok using it — and then he posted his full Amazon technical interview on YouTube to demonstrate the tool. Two days later, per Gizmodo, Amazon filed a “Behavioral Conduct Reporting Form” with Columbia. Amazon’s spokesperson noted candidates agree “not to use unauthorized tools during the interview process.” Columbia then suspended Lee for a year, and he dropped out — a sequence also covered by NBC News.

Here is the detail worth sitting with: the founder of this category got caught because he published a video of himself doing it. The origin of the “undetectable interview AI” space is, on the record, a documented detection-and-discipline case.

What happened next is where it gets tangled. Per Wikipedia’s entry on Roy Lee, Lee and co-founder Neel Shanmugam rebranded Interview Coder into Cluely in April 2025, and Cluely went on to raise a $5.3M seed and then a $15M Series A led by a16z.

And yet — interviewcoder.co is live today, selling a $299/month product under the Interview Coder name (verified 2026-07-12). So the two brands both exist, right now, as separate paid products, even though the public record describes one becoming the other.

[VERIFY exact corporate lineage before publishing: dossier §1.5 (Wikipedia/NBC) says Interview Coder was rebranded into Cluely in April 2025, yet interviewcoder.co operates today as a separate $299/mo product. Resolve whether Interview Coder was relaunched, sold to a new owner, or continued in parallel BEFORE stating any current relationship. Until resolved, the copy below deliberately says “shared origin,” never “Interview Coder is Cluely.”]

The honest framing, until that is nailed down: the two tools share a documented origin story, but how their ownership relates today is not something we can state from the public record. So let us judge them on what they actually are in July 2026.

Cluely today: it left the interview category

The most important fact about Cluely in 2026 is that its homepage no longer sells interview help. The hero reads “#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings” (cluely.com, 2026-07-12). It positions as a meeting assistant — live notes and AI insights on sales calls, standups, and general video meetings. Interview use is not the pitch anymore.

Cluely’s pricing, read directly from its pricing page on 2026-07-12:

• Starter — $0. Limited AI responses, limited notetaking, upload up to 3 files.
• Pro — $19.99/month. Unlimited AI responses, unlimited notetaking, latest AI models.
• Pro + Undetectability — $149.99/month. Everything in Pro plus “Completely hidden to meeting screen sharing software.”

Read that last tier again. Cluely paywalls the stealth itself. If you want to be invisible on a screen share, that is the $149.99/month plan — 7.5x the base Pro price, and roughly a $130/month line item just for the “undetectable” part. On the cheaper Pro plan, the feature the whole brand is named for is not included.

Cluely ships desktop apps for macOS 10.15+ and Windows 11 plus an iOS app (download page), and lists Zoom, Slack, Webex, Teams, and Google Meet as compatible (cluely.com). Its stealth wording is confident — “never shows up in shared screens, recordings, or external meeting tools” — but note that the strongest version of that claim lives behind the top tier.

One more thing an honest referee should mention: security researcher Jack Cable publicly reverse-engineered Cluely and reported finding its system prompts shipped in plaintext and a flaw he said could let a website capture screenshots; Cluely sent a DMCA takedown over his post, then the CEO apologized and donated to the EFF (also discussed on the Critical Thinking security podcast). That is a credibility footnote, not a detection claim — but it is on the record.

There is also a candor question higher up. In March 2026, Cluely CEO Roy Lee — the same founder who built Interview Coder — publicly admitted that the “$7M ARR” figure he had given the press was fabricated (the real number was closer to $5.2M), calling it “the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online” in what he framed as a formal retraction (TechCrunch). Because the same person’s fingerprints are on both products’ origin story, that is a thread worth keeping in mind when you weigh either brand’s marketing superlatives — not proof of anything about the software, but a reason to read the “100%” language on either site with your guard up.

Interview Coder today: still interviews, at $299/month

Interview Coder went the opposite direction. It doubled down on interviews — and now markets coverage across every interview type — with the hero “The No. 1 Undetectable AI For Interviews” (interviewcoder.co, 2026-07-12).

Its pricing, read from the homepage (note: the /pricing URL itself returns a 404, so the numbers live on the homepage) on 2026-07-12:

• Free Download — $0. You can install the app, but AI features require a subscription.
• Monthly Pro — $299/month, shown struck through from $499.
• Lifetime Pro — $799 one-time, shown struck through from $1,598.

A neutral observation on those strikethroughs: a “was $499, now $299” framing that appears to be perpetual is a common e-commerce pattern; treat the discount as marketing, not a countdown. What is not ambiguous is the floor — $299/month is the entry paid price, the highest recurring price of any tool we track. And it climbed there quickly: at launch in early 2025 Interview Coder was around $60/month (Gizmodo), so the real trajectory is a roughly 5x increase in about a year — set against a “was $499” strikethrough that never seems to expire.

On stealth, Interview Coder makes the strongest claims in the category, verbatim: “tested every single day against every single interview software for 100% undetectability” and “Zero documented cases of users being detected or flagged when using this tool properly” (interviewcoder.co). It lists broad platform coverage — Teams, Zoom, Meet, Amazon Chime, Webex, Lark, HackerRank, CoderPad, and Codility — and its homepage now markets coverage “Across Every Interview Type,” listing System Design, Behavioral, PM, Consulting and more, a notable expansion from its coding-interview origins.

Credit where due: if price is genuinely not a factor, Interview Coder is a serious, focused tool with a polished screenshot-to-solution workflow. But two things are worth a referee’s flag. First, the transparency posture: its macOS app installs under a disguised name — systemcontainer.app, DisplayName “systemcontainer,” BundleID com.interviewcoder.app, persisted on-disk from v2.6 through the current v3.0.1 — and its /pricing URL returns a 404, so the numbers live only on the homepage. Second, that “100% undetectability” absolutism is exactly the kind of claim the evidence does not support in every context (more below).

About “undetectable”: what the evidence actually supports

Both brands lean on “undetectable.” It is worth understanding what that word can and cannot mean, because it changes how you read both marketing pages.

On a plain video call — Zoom, Meet, Teams — a screen share captures pixels, not your running programs. A native app window that is properly excluded at the operating-system level genuinely does not appear in those pixels; this mechanism is well explained by engineer Adam Svoboda in “How interview cheating tools hide from Zoom.” So far, so good for the marketing.

The problem is that “undetectable” is not the same as “undetectable everywhere.” Detection that actually works does not squint at the screen share — it inspects the candidate’s machine or watches behavior. HackerRank’s own knowledge base says its Desktop App “detects and closes any other programs that candidates try to open during the test, including invisible cheating tools such as Cluely and Ultracode” (HackerRank KB). Proctorio and Honorlock publish similar companion-app approaches.

And here is the part a referee has to say out loud: this cuts against both products, because both are named, documented detection targets. HackerRank’s engineering team published a teardown of Interview Coder specifically. They report that on macOS “the tool is not invisible when the candidate is taking the test on MacOS… clearly visible to interviewers through the HackerRank screenshare feature,” and that on Windows “any mouse interaction triggered an ‘Out of Interview’ alert, which was automatically detected” (HackerRank engineering blog, 2025-03-19) — which is hard to square with Interview Coder’s “zero documented cases” line. On the Cluely side, a small cottage industry of detection startups now exists to catch it: per TechCrunch, Validia’s “Truely” and a tool called Proctaroo both target Cluely by name, with Proctaroo’s CEO saying that in a proctored session “we can see running applications and ‘hidden’ background processes — Cluely is no different.”

In other words, a vendor claiming “100%” and a proctoring vendor naming that same tool in its detection docs can both be telling the truth — because they are describing different setups. That is the honest reason no one should promise 100% of anything here, and it is why neither product’s absolute claim survives contact with a determined proctoring vendor.

So when Interview Coder says “zero documented cases” and Cluely sells “completely hidden” as a premium tier, read those as claims about the plain-video-call scenario, not a universal guarantee across proctored coding platforms.

The quiet third option

We should be upfront: this is our page, and Dusky is our product. We are not going to pretend it wins every row above — Cluely is cheaper at the entry tier, and Interview Coder covers coding platforms Dusky does not claim. But there is a gap between “a meetings tool where stealth costs $149.99/month extra” and “an interviews tool at $299/month whose pricing page 404s,” and that gap is roughly where Dusky sits: interviews only, with invisibility always on and included in every plan.

A few concrete differences, all from our own product facts:

• Invisibility is not an add-on tier and not a toggle. It is on by default in every session, including the free trial. On macOS this uses the system content protection API; on Windows, the display affinity API. Covered platforms include Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack Huddles, and CoderPad.
• Interviews beyond coding. An Interview Type control (Auto / Coding / Technical / Behavioral) formats answers for the round you are in — Behavioral uses STAR structure — and Think Deeper Mode adds up to 60 seconds of reasoning for system-design and multi-step problems. You can also add your CV and the job description so answers reflect your real experience, not generic filler.
• Pricing you can see, without a stealth upsell. A $0 trial (15 minutes of AI-assistance time, counted only while Dusky is actively answering — no credit card), a $19 Weekly Pass (7 days), a $69 Job Hunt Pass (8 weeks, the recommended plan at roughly $9/week), and $39/month Pro. One honest caveat we state plainly because the others do not: all sales are final — there are no refunds, which is exactly why the free trial exists.
• Where your interview content ends up. Both rivals route what they capture to third-party clouds — Cluely collects audio, transcriptions and screenshots, with end-to-end encryption off by default and enabled only on request (Cluely privacy policy), and Interview Coder’s screenshots go to unnamed “AI service providers” (Interview Coder privacy policy). Dusky passes your audio through for transcription and answers but stores none of it server-side — no transcripts, screenshots, or conversations kept.
• Our own limits, on the record. Test invisibility before every real interview (there is a built-in test). Turn on Zoom’s “Advanced capture with window filtering” setting. Corporate MDM policies can restrict the permissions Dusky needs. And a note we would rather you hear from us: the macOS build is signed and notarized, but the Windows build currently ships unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn you on install — choose More info, then Run anyway.

We do not claim “100%.” Nobody honestly can. If you want the long version, see Is Cluely detectable? for how detection actually works.

So which one?

• Pick Cluely if you mainly want an AI assistant for meetings — sales calls, standups, general note-taking — and you are fine paying $149.99/month if you need the screen-share stealth. It is no longer built around interviews.
• Pick Interview Coder if you want its polished screenshot-to-solution workflow and broad platform coverage, and $299/month or $799 lifetime fits your budget and your comfort with its absolute “100%” claims.
• Consider Dusky if you want an interview-only copilot that covers coding and behavioral and system-design rounds, with invisibility included in every plan and prices that start at a $19 one-time pass — from a company that would rather show you its caveats than promise you a guarantee.

For head-to-head detail, see Dusky vs Cluely and Dusky vs Interview Coder. If you have landed here specifically shopping to replace one of them, the Cluely alternative and Interview Coder alternative breakdowns go deeper.

Try Dusky free

You can download Dusky and use it for 15 minutes free — no credit card, all features unlocked, so you can run the invisibility test on your own machine before you decide anything. Get it at getdusky.app, or see every plan on the pricing page.

FAQ

Are Cluely and Interview Coder the same company?

They share a documented origin: Columbia student Roy Lee built Interview Coder, and public reporting (Wikipedia, NBC News) describes it being rebranded into Cluely in April 2025. However, interviewcoder.co still operates today as a separate $299/month product, so their current corporate relationship is not something we can state definitively. [VERIFY current corporate lineage before publishing this answer.]

Which is cheaper, Cluely or Interview Coder?

At the entry level, Cluely — its Pro plan is $19.99/month versus Interview Coder’s $299/month (both as of July 2026). But Cluely’s stealth feature lives on a separate $149.99/month tier, while Interview Coder includes undetectability in its subscription. So “cheaper” depends entirely on whether you need the stealth. (Cluely pricing, Interview Coder).

Does Cluely still work for interviews?

Cluely’s homepage now positions it as an AI for meetings, not interviews (cluely.com, July 2026). We are describing its current positioning, not testing its interview performance — if interviews are your goal, its own marketing no longer leads with that use case.

Is “100% undetectable” a real thing?

Treat it skeptically. On a plain video call, a properly excluded native window is genuinely invisible to a screen share because the call captures pixels, not processes (technical explainer). But proctored coding platforms are different — HackerRank’s own docs say its Desktop App detects and closes tools like Cluely and Ultracode (HackerRank KB), and its engineering team separately reported detecting Interview Coder on both macOS and Windows (HackerRank teardown). Both tools market total invisibility; both are named detection targets. No tool can honestly promise 100% across every setup, which is why Dusky does not.

What’s a lower-cost interview-only alternative?

Dusky is interview-only, keeps invisibility on in every plan, and starts at a $19 one-time Weekly Pass with a free 15-minute trial (no credit card). It covers coding, behavioral, and system-design rounds. See the pricing page or download at getdusky.app. Note that all sales are final — no refunds — which is why the trial exists.