You open Draftlytic, paste in your idea, and immediately hit a depth slider. Three options: Brief, Standard, Detailed.
Most people click Standard because it's in the middle, which is often the right instinct. But if you're on a paid plan and Detailed is available to you, or if you're trying to figure out whether to upgrade at all, the difference between these modes is worth understanding before you start.
This post breaks down what the Draftlytic depth slider actually changes, which project type fits which setting, and when Detailed is more than you need.
What the Draftlytic depth slider actually controls
The slider isn't just a label. It changes three concrete things across the whole flow.
The questions you're asked. Brief runs a short pass at the load-bearing decisions: what you're building, who it's for, roughly what the first version includes. Standard runs the full guided questionnaire, roughly twenty questions covering audience, tech stack, design, business model, and edge cases. Detailed goes further still, probing areas like constraints, competitor context, and collaboration model more thoroughly.
The prompt that gets sent to the AI. Once you answer questions, Draftlytic builds a structured spec using your answers. At Detailed depth, that spec prompt expands significantly. The AI gets more context on the nuances of your answers, and the instructions push it toward more granular output rather than stopping at the obvious conclusions.
The features and acceptance criteria in your plan. This is the one most people notice. At Brief, a feature might read "User authentication." At Standard, that becomes a feature with a description, platform notes, and a handful of acceptance criteria. At Detailed, acceptance criteria go deeper: edge cases, error states, specific behavior on failure. The kind of thing you'd want if a developer other than you was building it and you couldn't answer their questions in real time.
The quality difference compounds. A better question flow leads to a richer prompt, which leads to more specific acceptance criteria, which leads to less AI guesswork when you paste the spec into Cursor, Lovable, or whichever tool you're building with.
The credit cost reality and when each tier pays for itself
Standard project creation costs 50 credits. Detailed costs 65 credits. That's a 15-credit surcharge for the deeper run. On the editing side, a Standard AI edit is 10 credits; Detailed is 15 credits.
For context: free users get a monthly allowance just for signing up, and paid plans come with a healthy monthly bucket. The 15-credit delta on a project creation is not a material cost for most paid users. It's more of a signal about intent than a budget decision.
The question isn't really "can I afford Detailed?" It's "is this project complex enough to benefit from it?"
If you're building a weekend hack to show a friend, the extra credits won't buy you anything useful. The spec will be longer and more specific than the project needs to be, and you'll spend time reading acceptance criteria you don't need.
If you're building something you plan to actually ship, particularly with collaborators or real users, the 15-credit gap pays for itself the first time it prevents a misunderstanding between your spec and your AI tool's interpretation. One avoided back-and-forth in Cursor or Bolt is already worth more than that.
You can compare what's included at each plan tier on the Draftlytic pricing page if you're deciding whether to upgrade.
Three project archetypes that fit each depth
Here's a sharper way to think about it: match the depth to the stakes of the project.
Brief: the weekend hack. You have an idea you want to see working by Sunday. Maybe it's a personal utility, a demo for a talk, a proof of concept you might throw away afterward. You want to see the shape of the idea in a plan, not a 40-feature spec. Brief will give you a usable structure in under five minutes, and you can start prompting almost immediately. If it turns into something real, you can always regenerate at Standard depth later.
Standard: the side hustle. You're building something you'll share publicly. Maybe it eventually has users. Maybe you'll put it in the App Store or launch it on Product Hunt. The idea has some legs, and you want a spec that will hold up past the first week of building. Standard is the right setting here. It's complete enough to give your AI tool consistent context across many sessions, without asking you thirty questions about a project that might still pivot.
Detailed: the production build. You have stakeholders. Maybe a co-founder. Maybe early customers who've seen a landing page. Maybe a client who's paying for it. The spec is going to be read by someone who wasn't in the room when you described the idea, and it needs to be clear to them. This is when Detailed earns its keep. The deeper acceptance criteria become genuine source-of-truth documentation. The expanded prompt produces output that handles more edge cases without you having to catch them later in code review.
Detailed is available on Plus and Pro plans. If you're on Free or Starter, the option shows but it's locked. The Draftlytic pricing page has the plan comparison.
When Detailed is overkill
There's a version of picking Detailed that wastes your time instead of saving it.
The most common one: you're still validating an idea. You don't know yet if this app is something you'll actually build. You want a plan to see whether the idea has enough to it. In that case, Detailed is solving a problem you don't have yet. The question flow takes longer, the spec is richer than you need, and you'll end up skimming through acceptance criteria before you've even decided if the idea is worth pursuing.
Start at Brief or Standard. Get the shape of the plan. Decide whether the project has legs. Then regenerate at Detailed if it does.
Another one: you're exploring a feature idea within an existing project. You already have a Standard spec. You want to add one feature and see how the AI fleshes it out. An AI edit at Detailed depth will generate more thorough output, but for a single feature on a simple project, it's probably more than you need. Standard edits will do fine.
The honest rule: use Detailed when your project is going into production and ambiguity is expensive. Use Brief or Standard when you're still figuring things out.
Switching depth mid-project
You're not locked in to the depth you picked when you first created the project.
If you started with Brief and the project grew into something more serious, you can regenerate the plan or run an AI edit at a deeper setting. The edit will take the existing spec as its starting point and expand it. You don't lose what's already been approved or reordered.
If you started Detailed and want a lighter-touch edit for a small section, switch back to Standard for that edit. You save credits and get back a result faster.
A few scenarios where switching makes sense in practice:
- You did Brief to validate the idea. The idea stuck. Regenerate at Standard or Detailed before you start building in earnest.
- You did Detailed upfront and the project scope narrowed. Edit at Standard so you're not paying for thoroughness you don't need.
- You're done with the main build and adding a small extra feature. Standard edit is fast and usually sufficient.
The Draftlytic guided creation walkthrough has more on how the full flow works, including when to generate versus when to edit an existing plan.
Which setting should you start with?
If you're unsure about the Draftlytic depth slider: start at Standard. That's the safe answer.
Brief works if you genuinely want a lightweight overview and don't mind the AI filling in gaps. Detailed works when you know the project is real, the stakes are meaningful, and you're on Plus or Pro.
But most of the time, Standard will give you a spec that's complete enough to be useful without being so dense you spend your first hour reading it instead of building. Pick the depth based on how much you want the AI to guess, not based on which option sounds most impressive. The point is a plan that gets you building faster, not one that proves you asked the most questions.
Draftlytic is built around the idea that the planning thinking should happen before you open your AI coding tool, not across twenty confused follow-up prompts. The depth slider is just how much of that thinking you want to do upfront versus figuring out later.