Contribo
Contribo is an Italian AI assistant for tax advisers, tax lawyers and payroll consultants. It answers questions, reviews uploaded documents and drafts opinions using only a vetted bank of Italian and EU institutional sources, refreshed daily.
What is Contribo?
Contribo is an AI assistant built for Italian tax, accounting and employment-law practice, published by Skicelab SRL, a venture studio based in Florence. It is offered as a web application in Italian, and its whole design rests on one constraint: it works only from a bank of Italian and European institutional sources, does not browse the internet, and does not generate information that is not supported by those sources.
Three functions are advertised: regulatory research (ricerca normativa), analysis and verification of documents, and drafting. A question is asked in natural language and comes back as a reasoned answer carrying pinpoint references, each statement tied back to the original extract it comes from, so the professional can verify the chain rather than take the answer on trust.
Six families of sources are covered: Italian legislation (codes, laws, legislative decrees, DPR, regulations and international conventions); Agenzia delle Entrate practice (circolari, risoluzioni, provvedimenti, interpelli and FAQ); employment and social security material (CCNL, INPS and INAIL circulars and messages); tax and civil case law (Cassazione, Corti di Giustizia Tributaria and lower courts); accounting standards and filing templates (OIC, IFRS, 730, 770, CU, ISA, VAT returns); and European legislation (directives, EU regulations and CJEU judgments). The bank is synchronised daily, and the home page shows recent examples such as circolare 12/E on the regime forfettario, Cassazione 9821 on abuse of law, Legislative Decree 42/2026 on collection reform, INPS message 1840, EU Directive 2026/441 (DAC9) and OIC 34.
Four professional profiles are addressed, each with five documented use cases: commercialisti, tax lawyers, consulenti del lavoro, and CFOs and administrative staff. Documents can be uploaded as PDF, XML/XBRL financial statements, CSV or plain text. Usage is metered in messaggi: one query counts as one message regardless of answer length, number of sources or attachments, and failed queries are not counted.
Access is through a self-service web sign-up handled by Clerk. Contribo positions itself against generalist AI, naming ChatGPT in its own FAQ as the point of comparison, and states that its answers are continuously validated by sector professionals. It does not claim to replace professional judgement: the terms put the final assessment and the liability on the user.
What it does
- Ask a question in plain Italian and get a reasoned answer carrying pinpoint references
- Trace any statement in an answer back to the original extract of the source it came from
- Upload a tax notice, contract, financial statement or collection order and have it analysed against the rules in force
- Generate a draft parere, circolare, memoria or ricorso and export it to Word
- Identify the applicable CCNL and the correct employee classification
- Follow daily source updates: Agenzia delle Entrate circulars, Cassazione rulings, INPS messages, the Gazzetta Ufficiale and OIC standards
When to use Contribo / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Contribo is the right fit.
When to use Contribo
- Italian commercialisti who need a sourced answer behind every statement they make to a client, plus a first draft of pareri, circolari or memorie they can export to Word
- Tax lawyers working on disputes before the Corti di Giustizia Tributaria or the Court of Cassation, who need legislation, tax authority practice and case law pulled together quickly
- Consulenti del lavoro and payroll teams identifying the applicable CCNL and the correct employee classification
- CFOs and in-house administrative staff checking tax notices, contracts, financial statements or collection orders against the rules in force
- Firms that want a single message quota shared across the practice, which the Studio plan provides from a minimum of two seats
When not to use Contribo
- Professionals working outside Italy and the EU: the source bank covers Italian and European law only
- Anyone who does not read Italian, since the interface, the sources and the support are Italian only, with no English version
- Consumers and non-professional users: article 5.2 of the terms reserves the service for professional use and expressly excludes the Italian Consumer Code
- Teams looking for a tool that monitors the open web, because Contribo does not browse the internet and stays inside its indexed institutional sources
- Developers wanting to build on a public API: none is documented, integrations with practice-management software are still in development, and custom API work is reserved for the Enterprise plan
How to use Contribo
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign up on the website: registration is self-service through Clerk and needs no payment card for the Free plan
- Start with the 15 one-off messages of the Free plan, or activate the seven-day free trial on a paid plan from the customer portal (one per account); if it is not cancelled before it ends, the subscription starts automatically
- Type your question in plain Italian in the search and conversation bar
- Upload supporting files where relevant: PDF, XML/XBRL financial statements, CSV or plain text
- Read the answer and open the cited legislation, tax authority practice or case law to check each statement against its original extract
- Ask for a draft parere, circolare, memoria or ricorso, then export it to Word and finish it yourself
- Keep an eye on the counter of used and remaining messages in the customer portal
- Work from at most two workstations per user, never simultaneously, and do not share the account
- Contact support at help@contribo.ai, Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm excluding Italian public holidays, with a first response within 24 hours
- To leave, open Gestisci abbonamento then Disdici: renewal is switched off and access runs to the end of the current cycle
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A closed, institutional source perimeter: no web browsing and no unverified source
- Systematic traceability, every statement leading back to the original extract
- Sources synchronised daily, with all six families included in every plan, the Free one included
- A permanent free plan of 15 messages with no payment card, separate from the seven-day trial on paid plans
- Unusually explicit data governance: ten processors named one by one with their processing location, customer data located in the EU under article 8.3, and a no-training commitment obtained from all three AI providers
- A publisher identified without ambiguity, with company name, registered office, Italian VAT number, governing law and competent court, trading since 2011 and with three exits behind it
- Contractual support hours and response time, and cancellation at any time effective at the end of the cycle with no penalty
Cons
- No public API and no developer documentation; integrations with practice-management software are announced as still in development, and custom API integrations are reserved for the Enterprise plan
- Interface, sources and support are Italian only, and coverage is limited to Italian and EU law
- No mobile application: the product is a web application only
- Pricing is entirely tied to a message quota that does not accumulate, cannot be transferred, does not roll over and gives rise to no refund
- The Studio plan cannot be bought self-service, requiring sales contact and a minimum of two seats, and the Enterprise price is not published
- No security certification is claimed, neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2, no DPA is published or offered on request, and there is no customer-side training opt-out
- Articles 7.3 and 7.4 give no warranty of accuracy, completeness or currency of the answers, and a fair-use clause allows suspension above ten times the plan's monthly average over two months
Pricing & Plans
Contribo offers a permanent free plan: 15 messages in total, once only, with every source family included and no payment card required. The lowest paid entry point is the Professionista plan at EUR 75.00 per month excl. VAT, billed monthly, which includes 150 messages per month; taken annually, the same plan costs EUR 750.00 excl. VAT for 1,500 messages a year, the crossed-out EUR 900 shown on the home page being simply the monthly rate multiplied by twelve. The Studio plan costs EUR 50.00 per user per month, or EUR 500.00 per user per year on the annual view, with a minimum of two seats and 100 messages per month (1,000 per year) pooled across the firm; it is sold through sales contact only. The Enterprise plan is quoted on request and no price is published. Every paid plan carries a seven-day free trial. All prices are quoted excl. VAT (article 10.1), billing is in advance, monthly or annually (article 10.2), payment is handled by Stripe with no card data touched by Skicelab, and electronic invoicing is automatic. Prices may be revised once per calendar year after the initial period, with a 30-day right of withdrawal (article 10.3). Messages do not accumulate, cannot be transferred, do not roll over and give rise to no refund (article 4).
- EUR 0. Fifteen messages in total
- one-off
- all source families included
- no payment card required.
- EUR 75.00 per month
- or EUR 750.00 per year on the promotional annual view against a crossed-out EUR 900. For the sole practitioner. 150 messages per month or 1
- 500 per year
- all sources
- email support.
- EUR 50.00 per user per month
- or EUR 500.00 per user per year on the promotional annual view against a crossed-out EUR 600. For firms
- minimum two seats. 100 messages per month or 1
- 000 per year pooled across the firm
- all sources
- email support. Flagged on the site as the most chosen plan and subscribed through sales contact.
- price on request. Everything in Studio plus unlimited users
- a dedicated knowledge base
- onboarding and training
- and a dedicated account manager.
- All prices are excl. VAT
- and the pricing table opens by default on the annual view marked as a promotion.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Contribo handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is stated explicitly and in detail. The privacy policy is drawn up under Regulation (EU) 2016/679; the cookie policy also cites Directive 2002/58/EC, Legislative Decree 196/2003 as amended by Legislative Decree 101/2018, and the Garante guidelines of 10 June 2021. Four legal bases are set out: consent, performance of the contract, legal obligation and legitimate interest. Eight data subject rights are listed, including the right to lodge a complaint with the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali; requests are free and answered within one month. The controller's contact address is privacy@contribo.ai, while the policy routes rights requests to help@contribo.ai. The FAQ claims GDPR compliance in as many words. Because the publisher is established in Italy, no article 27 representative applies. No DPO is named and no DPA is published; all three legal documents are dated March 2026.
Who owns the data?
Under article 8.4 of the terms, the Client remains the owner of its Customer Data, and Skicelab undertakes not to use, alter, sell or transfer that data to third parties for any purpose outside the contract, whether for payment or free of charge. Where the Client is the data controller, article 8.2 makes Skicelab a processor within the meaning of article 28 GDPR. The user is responsible for any third-party data submitted. Intellectual property in the service itself stays with Skicelab (article 6.2). Note that article 16.4 lets Skicelab use the Client's name and logo as a commercial reference.
Reuse rights
Customer Data is processed only for the purposes of the contract (article 8.4), so the customer keeps free use of its own material and of the answers it obtains, subject to the limitation of liability in the terms and to its own professional duty to check them. The privacy policy names ten processors and states where each one processes data: Clerk (United States), Stripe Technology Europe (EU), Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager and the Gemini API (Ireland), Meta Pixel (Ireland), LinkedIn Insight Tag (United States), Anthropic Ireland (EU) and OpenAI Ireland (EU). Stated purposes cover sign-up and authentication, payments, statistics, contact, hosting, advertising, remarketing, tag management, anti-spam and AI processing. Prompts, documents and other content sent to the AI are processed solely to produce the requested answer and, the policy states, are not used to train the models under the applicable contractual terms. Profiling cookies (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, DoubleClick) require explicit consent. One reservation: article 16.4 allows Skicelab to cite the customer's name and logo commercially, with no opt-out provided.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Article 8.3 of the terms is the primary statement: unless otherwise provided, Customer Data is located in one or more countries of the European Union. The FAQ repeats that data is kept on servers inside the European Union. No specific country is named and no region is detailed beyond the European Union itself, which is why no hosting country is listed on this page. Processing locations are disclosed processor by processor: the EU for Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI and the Gemini API; Ireland for Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager and Meta; the United States for Clerk and LinkedIn. The privacy policy adds, without further detail, that data may be transferred outside the user's own country. Article 9 covers HTTPS connections and logical separation between customers' data. One technical observation not declared by the site: the web server resolves to 78.46.44.248, AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH, in Falkenstein, Germany. That is consistent with the EU commitment, but it is our own finding and not a published statement.
Where Contribo works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Contribo.
- Over-reliance is the first risk. The terms give no warranty of accuracy, completeness or currency, and articles 7.3 and 7.4 leave the final assessment and the liability with the professional: a sourced answer still has to be read against its source, and a habit of accepting drafts unchecked erodes the very skill the tool is meant to serve.
- The FAQ advertises end-to-end encryption, yet uploaded documents are processed by three third-party AI APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI and Google). The phrase should be read as commercial language rather than a technical property.
- PostHog analytics is loaded in the application bundle with a live project key but is named in neither the privacy policy nor the cookie policy, although both list the other measurement tools by name. The published processor list therefore looks incomplete.
- Article 3 of the terms sets a default initial term of twelve months, while article 10.2 and the pricing table provide for monthly billing. Clarify the commitment before subscribing.
- Article 16.4 lets Skicelab use the customer's name and logo as a commercial reference, with no opt-out provided, which matters for firms bound by client confidentiality.
- Unused messages are lost at the end of each cycle, with no roll-over and no refund, and a fair-use clause allows suspension after formal notice above ten times the plan's monthly average over two consecutive months.
- Small inconsistencies to keep in mind: two GDPR addresses coexist, privacy@contribo.ai being the controller's address while rights requests are routed to help@contribo.ai; the company name appears in three different spellings across the site and the register; and all three legal documents are dated March 2026 with no day.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. There is nothing to install: Contribo is a web application reached through a browser. Sign-up is self-service and handled by Clerk, with no payment card required for the Free plan, and there is no technical configuration and no connector to set up. No technical skill is needed beyond using a search bar and uploading files. The only constraints are contractual: the account is personal and cannot be shared, and a user may work from at most two workstations, never simultaneously. The Studio and Enterprise plans go through a prior sales conversation rather than self-service.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Contribo
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Contribo.
Frequently asked questions
What is Contribo?
How is it different from ChatGPT or another generalist AI?
Does Contribo replace the professional?
Which file formats can I upload?
How often are the sources updated?
Are my data and my clients' data safe?
What counts as a message?
What is the difference between the Free plan and the free trial?
Can I cancel at any time?
Does Contribo connect to my practice-management software?
Should you pick Contribo?
Contribo is a niche tool and makes no secret of it: one market, one language, one closed documentary perimeter. That narrowness is the point. By refusing to browse the web and working only from Italian and European institutional sources, it can do what a generalist assistant cannot promise, namely tie every statement back to the extract it came from. For a commercialista, a tax lawyer or a consulente del lavoro, that traceability is the whole value proposition, and it is the fair price paid for the missing breadth.
Data governance is unusually explicit for a product of this size: ten processors named one by one with their processing location, customer data located in the European Union under the terms, and a no-training commitment covering all three AI providers. The counterweight is just as clear, since no security certification is claimed, no DPA is published, and there is no customer-side training opt-out.
Pricing is readable but entirely built on a message quota that does not roll over, is not transferable and is not refundable. A permanent free plan of 15 messages, plus a seven-day trial on paid plans, makes the tool easy to judge before committing.
Note the two different ages behind the product: the publisher, Skicelab SRL, has been trading since 2011 and has three exits to its name, while the product's own domain was registered only in March 2026. This is an established company shipping a recent product.
Finally, the terms are unambiguous on the essential point: no warranty is given on the accuracy, completeness or currency of the answers, and the professional remains solely responsible for what they do with them. Contribo shortens the research, it does not carry the liability.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.