Every release of ORBIT, newest first. Each entry says what changed for the people using it; the technical notes underneath say how. Nothing here is back-dated, and where no record of a release survives the entry says so.
5 September 2026 — Its own domain, and a way to pay
ORBIT moved to orbit-research.app, and credits can now be bought directly instead of arranged by message.
The site lives at orbit-research.app. Search results and shared links stop carrying a hosting provider's name.
Credit packs can be bought with a card or UPI. There is still no subscription and no card kept on file — credits never expire.
Institution accounts: a department can hold one shared pool, set per-department caps, and invite named seats against it.
Every sale now issues a numbered invoice.
2 September 2026 — Figure Builder and Reference Check
The ninth and tenth tools went live, and one of them only charges when it finds something.
Figure Builder: drop in a table and get a publication-ready figure back, across 41 chart and diagram types.
Reference Check reads a reference list against the record and flags what is retracted, unresolvable, orphaned or uncited.
Reference Check charges at the check itself and only when it actually found something. A run where nothing is wrong is free — which is also the shape of a vendor outage.
Styling, the corrected list and every export are free after the check has run.
31 August 2026 — Every tool learned to report a failure
When something fails, it now says what failed instead of returning an empty frame.
A tool that cannot complete names the input it is missing, rather than showing a blank result.
Deleted work goes to a recycle bin first, so an accidental deletion is recoverable.
27 August 2026 — Paper to Slides, and a deadline board
The last stage of the pipeline arrived: turn the finished paper into something you can present.
Paper to Slides turns a finished .docx into a slide deck. Outline mode keeps your own words.
A conference deadline board, refreshed daily.
A notifications bell in the dashboard, so a guideline change on a journal you target reaches you.
26 August 2026 — Dataset Discovery, and a second way in
Find open data for a study, and sign in without a Google account.
Dataset Discovery searches Zenodo, figshare and Dryad by topic. Nothing on it is charged at any point.
Sign in with LinkedIn as well as Google.
25 August 2026 — Literature Discovery
Search the literature by topic and see which papers you can legally read for free.
Search roughly 250 million papers by topic, filter to what is legally free to read, and export the list — free.
One credit ranks the results against your own abstract.
24 August 2026 — Cover letter builder
Draft the submission letter from the title and abstract you already have.
Generate a journal cover letter from your manuscript's title and abstract.
It leaves blanks where it does not know something, rather than inventing an editor's name, a funder or a claim you never made.
21 August 2026 — The whole public surface, rebuilt
Every marketing page was rebuilt on one skeleton, and the cookie notice stopped saying things that were not true.
Every public page now shares one layout grammar, on the marketing side and inside the dashboard.
The cookie notice was rewritten. Three of the things it claimed were not accurate descriptions of what the site actually set.
Several inherited marketing claims were removed outright — a user count nobody had counted, and a conversion speed nobody had measured.
14 August 2026 — Privacy and Terms, rewritten for DPDP
The legal pages were rewritten against India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and one product claim came off the whole site.
Privacy Policy and Terms of Service rewritten to the DPDP Act.
AI-drafting claims removed sitewide. They described something the product did not do.
A 12-month inactivity erasure promise — with a scheduled job that actually performs it, rather than a sentence saying it would.
10 August 2026 — The formatting engine, rebuilt
ORBIT stopped rebuilding your document and started editing the one you gave it.
Figures, tables, embedded equations, footnotes, numbering and inline formatting now survive a conversion unchanged.
Formatting is a deterministic transformation of your file. No language model is involved and your manuscript text is not sent to a third-party AI service.
9 August 2026 — Paper Readiness Check
Check a manuscript against a journal's own stated submission rules before you send it.
Pick a target journal, upload a manuscript, and get compliance checks across every category the journal states a rule for, each with a specific fix.
Where a journal publishes no rule for a check, the result reads 'not stated' and is excluded from the score. Silence is never counted as a pass.
Your manuscript is unzipped and analysed by JavaScript in your own browser. There is no upload step, because there is nothing to upload to — only the resulting score and the journal name are recorded.
7 August 2026 — The public API was withdrawn
The developer API shipped in April was taken back down, and pricing became a single flat number.
The public /api/v1 developer API was removed and its route archived. A public API is a compatibility promise, and it was a bigger one than this project could keep.
Pricing became flat: ₹500 per credit, bought in packs, with no subscription.
April 2026 — API keys, admin tooling and security
A developer API, an admin panel behind it, and the first real security pass.
Developer API keys, with live and test pairs. (Withdrawn again in August — see above.)
An admin panel for reviewing accounts and conversions in bulk.
A round of SEO work, image handling and licence terms.
March 2026 — Rebuilt as a real product
The single-tool formatter grew a dashboard, accounts, credits and a public site around it.
A dashboard with conversion history and a credit balance.
Accounts, sign-in and a free monthly allowance.
A public marketing site, pricing, dark mode and a cookie consent banner.
5 January 2026 — The first version
ORBIT went live as one tool that did one thing: format a paper.
A single formatter, no accounts and no dashboard. Everything on this page came after it.