Cluely’s CEO Retracted the $7M Claim; Glass Now Credits Its Source

Cluely remains a functioning commercial product, but the growth figure that defined its rapid 2025 rise no longer stands. A March 5, 2026 TechCrunch account documents CEO Roy Lee’s formal retraction of the $7 million annual recurring revenue claim and reproduces the June 2025 figures he later supplied: $2.7 million in consumer ARR and $2.5 million in enterprise ARR, or $5.2 million combined.

Glass, Pickle’s open-source desktop assistant, also remains publicly available after the dispute over its origins. The current Glass repository identifies CheatingDaddy as the project it was forked from, credits Soham and other contributors, carries a GPL-3.0 license, and shows about 7,600 stars, 1,100 forks and 178 commits.

The revenue correction changes Cluely’s breakout story

Cluely’s early narrative joined two separate signals: extraordinary attention generated by provocative “cheating” marketing and a claim of extraordinary commercial growth. The retraction breaks that connection. Viral reach was visible, but it did not independently validate the revenue figure supplied by the company’s chief executive.

The replacement figures still describe a business generating recurring revenue. They do not support the larger claim that circulated during the company’s initial surge, and they reveal nothing about Cluely’s present revenue. ARR is an annualized run-rate measure, not audited revenue collected over a full year, so even an accurate ARR snapshot must be tied to its measurement period.

The episode also illustrates why founder-supplied startup metrics require precise attribution. A funding announcement, a viral campaign and an ARR estimate measure different things; none verifies the others. After a formal withdrawal, the defensible record is the withdrawal and the corrected historical figures—not the original number preserved as evidence of momentum.

Cluely still sells real-time assistance and concealment

The correction did not remove Cluely from the market. Its current official pricing page lists a free Starter tier, a Pro plan at $19.99 per month and a Pro + Undetectability plan at $149.99 per month; the highest tier is described as hidden from meeting screen-sharing software.

That packaging preserves the tension at the center of the product. Cluely combines recognizable meeting-assistant functions—live responses, notes and access to previous meetings—with a paid capability designed to keep the assistant outside a shared view. The same software can therefore support disclosed note-taking or undisclosed prompting, depending on how it is used.

Availability and credibility should not be conflated. The live pricing page establishes that Cluely is still offering the product and identifies its advertised tiers. It does not establish subscriber totals, current revenue or the effectiveness of concealment across every operating system and conferencing setup.

Glass’s present attribution resolves one question, not the entire dispute

The original Glass controversy was widely framed as a code-theft scandal, but that label is stronger than the verifiable conclusion. The public record supports describing a provenance, attribution and licensing dispute involving reused open-source code. The cited material does not establish a court judgment that Pickle committed civil or criminal theft.

The distinction matters because open-source code is available for reuse under conditions, not free of conditions. Forking can be legitimate, while distributing the result under an incompatible license or obscuring its upstream origin can still create serious compliance and trust problems. Correcting a repository’s license and credits improves the project’s present status without erasing questions about how the initial release was represented.

Glass’s visible development history also changes the “overnight clone” framing. It is now a maintained public fork with an acknowledged upstream project, a substantial audience and unresolved work visible in its repository. That is more specific—and less sensational—than treating it either as an entirely original rival or as nothing more than copied code.

What remains true after both corrections

Cluely and Glass still occupy the same contested product category: desktop assistants that can interpret a live conversation and on-screen context, then surface answers or notes while the interaction continues. Their survival shows that demand for real-time assistance did not depend entirely on the most dramatic claims attached to their launches.

What changed is the evidentiary basis for comparing them. Cluely’s withdrawn growth claim cannot be used as a reliable measure of present scale. Glass’s current repository no longer leaves its CheatingDaddy lineage ambiguous, but the correction does not make the original attribution controversy irrelevant.

The durable lesson is narrower than the early drama suggested. Marketing can make a product visible, but it cannot authenticate financial performance; publishing code can make a project inspectable, but it does not automatically satisfy licensing and attribution obligations. In both cases, scrutiny produced a more accurate public record than the launch narrative did.

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