You don't need more information. You need the right information.
2026-04-07 · By Chris Knight
It's a Wednesday evening. You're three days out of a five year tenancy, mid-move, tired. An email arrives from your letting agent. Your landlord is claiming £1,395 from your deposit. Damaged walls across the whole property, electrical sockets, radiators, something unspecified in the kitchen. No invoices. No photos. Just numbers.
You do what most people do. You open ChatGPT.
What comes back is accurate. Fair wear and tear, burden of proof, depreciation, deposit schemes. It tells you to ask for evidence, challenge the redecoration claim, raise a formal dispute. Genuinely useful. Also eleven sections long, structured like a legal briefing, ending with "just say the word."
You needed to know what to do first. You got a research project.
I ran the actual Foxtons deduction letter from December 2025 through both tools.
ChatGPT's response is not wrong. But look at the shape of it — the length, the headers, the volume. Then look at DepositAdvisor's: four specific items assessed against adjudication standards, one next step, nothing else.
The difference is not intelligence. It is design. One is a general assistant. The other is built from TDS and mydeposits adjudication guidance — it knows what a dispute assessor actually looks for when they open a file.
I asked one follow-up: they haven't provided any invoices or quotes, just the amounts. Does that matter?
Both answers are good. ChatGPT's is longer and covers the same ground. DepositAdvisor's ends with a specific action rather than an offer to help further. Also visible at the bottom of the ChatGPT screenshot: three messages remaining before a paywall. Mid-dispute, three questions in.
Both tools can answer a general question about deposit law. One is a fire hose. One is a surgeon. As the dispute gets more specific — edge cases, depreciation, prescribed information failures, the precise language schemes respond to — a general model starts pattern-matching rather than retrieving. Just enough to matter when it counts.
Right now, at the free tier, the difference is focus and grounding. Real, and real in the moment that matters.
As the paid tier ships the comparison stops being close. DepositAdvisor will hold your entire dispute in context — fair figure calculations, evidence assessment, letters drafted to adjudication standards, session memory across your whole case. A general assistant prompted toward a specific problem is not the same as a system built around it.
If you have a deduction letter, paste it in. You will have a fairness read and a next step in under a minute.