You just captured a competitor's pricing page, their signup flow, and three screens of their dashboard. You want to send the whole thing to your team without spinning up a folder in Drive, uploading images, and pasting a dozen links into a doc. Below are the questions that come up when you run a teardown this way, answered plainly.
Where do the screenshots actually live if I don't upload them anywhere?
They live inside the published review. When you capture a competitor's screen in a browser tab, crop the still, and add your comment, each screenshot becomes an item attached to that review. On Publish, the whole thing gets saved and served at a short public URL of the form /r/<slug>. You are not managing image hosting, naming files, or keeping a folder in sync. The screenshot and the note that explains it stay together in one place, which is the entire point of running a competitive analysis in a single review link instead of a scattered doc.
Do I need an account to publish a teardown?
No. You can capture, comment, and publish with no signup at all. A review can go out fully anonymous. An account is optional and free, and if you want one, sign-in is by Google or an emailed magic link. Skipping the account is useful when you are doing a fast one-off teardown and don't want to make a decision about tooling before you've even shared the findings.
How long does an anonymous review stay up?
An anonymous review is kept for 30 days. If you sign in afterward, you claim it permanently and the clock stops. So a quick teardown you publish without an account is fine to share around this week. If it turns into a reference your team keeps citing next quarter, sign in and claim it before the window closes. The 30-day window explained in detail covers what happens on day 31 and how claiming works.
Who can see the link once I publish it?
Anyone with the link can read the review. There is no per-viewer login and no invite step. You paste the URL into Slack or an email and the receiver opens it in their browser. People with the link can also post a comment on any individual item, so a colleague can add "their onboarding does this too" right on the screenshot instead of replying in a separate thread. As the owner, you can mark each comment resolved. For a full breakdown of viewer permissions, see who can see, comment on, and resolve items.
Can I annotate the competitor's live page, like draw arrows on it?
No, and you don't want to. Cobalt Capture crops a captured still rather than drawing on the live page. A competitor's site changes: they ship a redesign, run an A/B test, or pull a promo. A still frame is a fixed record of what you saw on the day you looked. To point at a specific spot, drop a numbered pin on the screenshot. That marks the exact button or field without covering it in ink. If you're weighing the two approaches, why a cropped still beats an annotated live page makes the case in full.
How do I hand the teardown to a developer or an AI agent, not just people?
The same review is available three ways from one publish. There's the public link for teammates, a PDF or Word export for anyone who wants a document, and plain-text markdown at /r/<slug>/markdown. If you're feeding the analysis to an agent to draft a spec or compare features, the markdown is the format it reads cleanly. You capture once and pick the output per receiver. No re-formatting a Figma-style doc into something a tool can parse.
Can I record video of the competitor's flow instead of still screenshots?
No. This captures still frames, not video. For a teardown that's usually what you want anyway: a checkout flow reads better as five labeled stills with a note on each step than as a two-minute video someone has to scrub through. Use numbered pins to set the reading order so a reviewer follows the flow step by step. If you specifically need moving footage, this is the wrong tool for that job.
Does dictation work while I'm walking through a competitor's screens?
Yes, in Chrome and Edge. Capture a screen, then talk through what you're seeing instead of typing. The browser's built-in speech recognition turns it into the comment on that item. It's fast for a teardown because you're already looking at their pricing table and can just say what stands out. Firefox doesn't support this, so reviewers there type instead. For a longer teardown, dictation beats typing when you have a lot to say per screen.
How do I know if anyone actually read it?
Each review has an owner-facing analytics page with visit counts and visitor geography. If you sent a competitor teardown to five stakeholders and want to know whether they opened it before the strategy meeting, the visit count tells you. It won't say who read it by name, but it confirms the link is being used. See reading the visit counts on a review for what the numbers mean.
Ready to run one? Start a new review, capture the competitor screens you care about, and publish. No install, no extension, free.