Frequently asked questions

No. There are no automation builders, no flowcharts, and nothing to configure in a scripting language. You pick an assistant role from the library, answer a short set of plain-English questions about your business and how you want it to sound, connect the apps you already use, and it starts working. Everything after that happens in normal conversation and in a review queue.

Minutes, not weeks. Setup is self-serve: a setup guide walks you through choosing a plan, telling us about your business and what you sell, then hiring an assistant from the library and answering its setup questions — typically 10–15 minutes in all. Your assistant is provisioned into your workspace as soon as you finish. There's no waiting list, no scoping call, and no engineer building anything behind the scenes before you can use it.

Yes — 14 days free, and no card needed. It starts when you verify your email, and you get every assistant (the Busywork Buster's features) with 150 tasks to try them on. Because we never take a card, nothing can quietly auto-charge you: when the trial ends, your assistants simply pause and everything you made is kept until you choose a plan. One trial per workspace.

The roles you can hire today are the Social Media Assistant, Blog Writing Assistant, Email Marketing Assistant, Lead Generation Assistant, Marketing Campaign Orchestrator, Brand Designer, Mystery Shopper and Website Assistant — each is marked Available Now in Hire Assistant, which is always the up-to-date list. Other roles on the Meet the Assistants page are at different stages — anything still in private beta is clearly marked Coming Soon and offers a waitlist rather than letting you hire it. We'd rather show you the roadmap than sell you a role that isn't finished.

A human VA works set hours, needs training, and costs many times more. Your digital assistants work to a schedule you set, come pre-trained for their role, track their own goals, and never go on holiday — while you keep final approval on everything that goes out the door. The honest trade-off: a human VA can use judgement in situations nobody briefed them on, and your assistant can't. It's very good at the repeatable work that eats your week, and it always shows you its output before it commits to anything.

Every workspace has a Business Mentor, on every plan, and it doesn't take one of your plan's assistant places. It's your business coach: it looks across your workspace and your team's work, tells you the few things it would sort out first, helps you test an idea, write a business or marketing plan and work out a break-even point, and looks things up with sources. Once a week it reviews what happened against your plan and goals. When it suggests a change to one of your assistants, it shows a card. Nothing changes until you press the button. It doesn't write your posts or emails itself: your other assistants do that.

It's included on every plan at no extra cost. Chatting with it doesn't use tasks, under the same fair use as every chat. Three things use 1 task each, and only when they deliver: a researched answer with sources, a plan it drafts for you in the background, and its weekly review. You can switch the weekly review off, or put the Mentor in Quiet mode so it only answers when you ask.

Your Business Information, products and offers, your assistants and their set-up, goals, Brand Knowledge, what your assistants did recently, and your plan and task use. When you ask, it can also look at results and, through your active assistants, at your customers in summary. It never sees passwords or connection keys, your contacts' personal details, the messages your leads send, or card details, and it never reads your chats with your other assistants. The full list is on its Overview tab under "What I can see".

Short vertical videos, 15, 30 or 60 seconds, for Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels, with YouTube Shorts coming soon. It writes the script from your business details and products, builds each scene from stock footage, your own pictures, branded cards or AI, and adds a voiceover and captions. You check the storyboard before anything is made, and the finished video waits in your Review Queue for your approval. It doesn't edit footage you give it, make long YouTube videos or post to TikTok yet.

Planning a storyboard is free. Making the video uses tasks only for AI scenes and the voiceover: 20 tasks for an AI clip (at most 3 in a video), 1 for an AI picture and 1 for the voiceover. Stock footage, stock photos, your own pictures and branded cards use none, and the exact number is on the "Make the video" button before you press it. Making videos is on the Busywork Buster plan.

When you first set up your assistant, you'll go through a short onboarding process where you share a few things: your brand name, the tone you want (friendly, professional, bold, etc.), examples of content you love, and who your customers are. Think of it like briefing a new team member on their first day. From there, your assistant picks up patterns from everything it produces for you. The more you use it — and the more you approve or tweak its output — the sharper it gets at sounding like you, not a generic robot.

Not at all. The initial setup takes around 10–15 minutes, and from there your assistant works from the preferences and examples you gave it. You won't be sitting at a dashboard feeding it instructions every morning. That said, the more specific feedback you give it over the first couple of weeks, the faster it dials in. After that, most customers find they barely need to touch the settings.

This will happen — especially early on, and that's completely normal. Every piece of content your assistant produces lands in a review queue for you to approve before anything is published or sent. Nothing goes live without your approval unless you've specifically turned on automatic publishing for a particular workflow. If something's off, you reject it with a note explaining why, and the assistant regenerates the piece using that feedback. Think of it as a first draft from a very fast copywriter, not a final decision-maker — and check anything factual, because AI output is confident even when it's wrong.

Your assistant can do both — it's up to you. For recurring work (say three social posts a week, or a blog post every fortnight), you set the cadence once during setup and your assistant drafts to that schedule on its own. You don't need to be logged in. For one-off jobs or anything that needs your specific input, you can open a chat and brief it whenever you like. Most customers set up their routines once and then check the review queue a couple of times a week.

Think of it as a second pair of eyes built into the process. Before your assistant's content reaches you for final approval, the Quality Reviewer checks it against your brand guidelines — flagging anything that sounds off-brand, factually shaky, or inconsistent in tone — and can suggest a rewrite you apply with one click. It's the difference between handing you a rough draft versus a polished near-final draft, and it saves a lot of back-and-forth on customer-facing content.

Today each workspace is run by one person. Inviting colleagues, managers or clients to review and approve your assistants' work is coming soon to the Busywork Buster. If your team needs to work through the same assistants together now — account managers, content leads, ops staff, with shared context — that is something we set up for you as a Bespoke Assistant. Get in touch and we'll agree what you need.

Every one of your assistants reads your Products & Services list (in Business Information) before it writes. With it, posts, articles, emails and outreach name what you sell correctly and only ever quote the prices you give — leave a price blank and it's never mentioned. Without it, your assistants can only describe your business in general terms. It's a step in the setup guide, and takes a couple of minutes.

Not while they're prospects — a lead is a business you might contact once, and it hasn't agreed to receive your newsletter, so it stays inside the Lead Generation Assistant. When a lead becomes a customer, you can add them: mark it Won and leave Add them to my Audience ticked, and your Email Marketing Assistant can email them. UK and EU law allow you to email existing customers about similar products as long as every email lets them unsubscribe, and every email we send does. Anyone who asked not to be contacted is never added, and an unsubscribe is never undone.

Yes. On the Audience page, press Export to Excel, choose who to include (the contacts you've ticked, everyone matching your filters, or your whole audience) and tick the fields you want. You get an .xlsx file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Every export is recorded — who, when, how many and which fields — under Export history on the same page, because an export contains personal data you're responsible for looking after.

You do. As between you and us, you own all rights in the outputs your assistants generate from your inputs, and we assign to you any rights we might otherwise have in them. Two honest caveats, both set out in our Terms of Service: AI outputs aren't guaranteed to be unique, and how far copyright protects AI-generated work is still unsettled law in the UK and US. Before you publish anything commercially important, it's on you to check it doesn't tread on someone else's intellectual property — the same check you'd do on a freelancer's work.

Emails your assistant drafts and sends on your behalf carry a short AI disclosure footer — this is a transparency requirement under the EU AI Act, and it's applied by the platform rather than left to the assistant to remember. You can customise the wording (as long as it still makes the AI involvement clear), and disclosure settings for other content types live in your workspace under each assistant's guardrails. If disclosure matters to your industry, ask us before you sign up and we'll walk you through exactly what gets labelled where.

We support a curated list of integrations rather than a "thousands of apps" directory — each one is built and maintained properly instead of half-working. Live today: social publishing (Facebook Pages, Instagram, your personal LinkedIn feed, X and Threads), email (Gmail and Outlook, plus your own sending domain), your website and Google Search Console, and Canva. Zapier and Make let your Lead Generation Assistant pass qualified leads on to almost any other app. Coming soon: CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho), helpdesks (Zendesk, Intercom), accounting (Xero, QuickBooks), YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn Company Pages, paid ads on Meta, LinkedIn and Google, and Slack, Notion, Jira and Asana, which arrive with the Minute Taker. Every connection, what it does and whether it is live is on the Connections page. If a specific tool is make-or-break for you, ask us before you sign up and we'll tell you straight.

No. Connect whatever your assistants need to do their jobs — how many tools you link depends on which assistants you hire, not on your plan. You can disconnect or swap an account at any time.

No — and that's Meta's rule, not ours. Meta only lets apps like Be More Swan post to business accounts: a Facebook Page (not a personal profile), and an Instagram Business or Creator account that is linked to that Page. You'll also need admin access to the Page. Both are free to set up, and switching an Instagram account to a professional one takes a minute in its settings. When you connect, your workspace walks you through these checks first.

Yes, at any time. Disconnect an account and connect another from the Connections area of your workspace — if you connected X in your first week and want LinkedIn instead next month, just swap them. Nothing you've already published is affected when you disconnect an account.

Connections do occasionally break — you change your password, a platform expires an access token, or you revoke permissions from the platform's own settings. When that happens the connection is badged in your workspace as needing attention and we notify you; anything queued for that account waits rather than failing silently. Reconnecting is a two-click job from the Connections area. It's worth glancing at your connection statuses if a scheduled post doesn't appear when you expected it.

Check the Connections page first — it lists everything that is live and coming soon. If your tool works with Zapier or Make, your Lead Generation Assistant can already send qualified leads to it that way. Beyond that, a tool that isn't on the list may just need a custom integration, which we can build as part of a Bespoke Assistant. Get in touch and we'll be straight with you about what's possible and what it would involve.

One task is one finished piece of work your assistant does for you: a social post (once, even when it goes out to several platforms), a blog article, a lead search (once per search, however many leads it finds), an email or an email flow, an outreach email to a lead, a website audit or draft, or the words for a printable flyer. Work is only counted once it's delivered — if something fails and retries, you aren't charged for the attempt. Every plan has one monthly task allowance that covers all of this, including AI media — there are no separate credits. What doesn't count: browsing your dashboard, approving or scheduling something that's already drafted, editing a draft yourself, changing settings, connecting an app, uploading your own photos, using stock photos and branded cards, or making a flyer's pages and print files. Your live usage is always visible on your billing page.

No. Chatting with your assistants is free, and so are the editing helpers — rewriting a post, suggesting hooks or overlay text, a quality review, applying suggestions, and compliance checks. To keep the service fast for everyone, each workspace has a daily fair-use limit: 300 chat messages and 200 helper actions in any 24 hours. Almost nobody gets near it. If you do, chat and the helpers pause for a while and free up again within a day — you are never charged for them, and your task allowance isn't touched.

A few outputs cost far more to make than words, so they count as several tasks out of the same allowance: an AI image is 1 task, an AI video is 20 (on the Busywork Buster plan), an AI music track is 20 (12 if you share the track with the Be More Swan community), and a post to X with a link is 10. A text-only X post costs nothing beyond the post's own task. Your billing page breaks down what your tasks were used on.

You'll receive a notification at 80% of your monthly allowance, telling you how many tasks you have left. If you have bonus tasks, your assistants carry on using those once the monthly allowance is spent. When both run out your assistants pause until the allowance resets — you'll be prompted to upgrade or wait for the reset. The limit is a hard ceiling: we never charge you for going over it, so the bill you agreed to is the bill you get. Work already drafted and waiting in your review queue stays there. Upgrading raises your allowance straight away, and paused assistants start working again overnight (by about 1am UK time).

No — the monthly allowance does not roll over. It resets on the 1st of each calendar month (UTC), separately from your billing date, so a mid-month subscriber gets a full allowance straight away. Bonus tasks are different: those never expire.

Bonus tasks are extra tasks held on your workspace that never expire. They're only used after your monthly allowance runs out, so a busy month dips into them and a quiet month leaves them untouched. When we moved to a single task allowance on 17 October 2026, any AI media credits you had left became bonus tasks (each credit became 4 tasks), and any X posting credits you'd bought and not used became bonus tasks one for one. Your bonus balance is shown on your billing page.

Since 17 October 2026 they're gone — everything now comes out of one monthly task allowance, and plan allowances were raised to cover the media they used to include. Nothing you'd already paid for was lost: remaining balances were converted into bonus tasks that never expire (see above).

No. Every plan is a fixed flat fee — there are no per-task or per-compute charges, and going over your monthly allowance pauses your assistants rather than billing you more. Your bill is exactly the same amount every month unless you choose to change plan.

No. All plans are rolling monthly subscriptions. Cancel or upgrade at any time — no notice period, no penalties, and no phone call to sit through. Cancelling is not refunded for time already paid: you keep access until the end of your current billing period, and you simply won't be charged again after that.

It means there's no fixed end date and no long-term commitment. You pay month to month, and your plan renews automatically each month on the same date you originally signed up. If you cancel, your access continues until the end of that billing period — you won't be charged again after that, but the payment you've already made for the current period is not refunded. There are no cancellation fees and no exit penalties.

Yes, from the Billing page, and the two directions work differently on purpose. Upgrades take effect immediately — your bigger task allowance and the plan's extra features unlock the moment you confirm, and you receive a prorated credit for the unused portion of your current period against your next invoice. You'll see a preview of exactly what you'll be charged before you commit. Downgrades take effect at the start of your next billing period, so you keep everything you've paid for until then, and you can cancel a scheduled downgrade any time before it lands.

Yes — the annual plan is billed as a single payment at the start of your year, and in return you pay 20% less than the monthly rate (roughly two and a half months free). If you'd prefer not to pay a lump sum, the monthly rolling contract is always there. If you cancel partway through the year, your access continues to the end of the annual period you already paid for, but the remaining months are not refunded — so pick annual only if you're confident, and start monthly if you're not.

Yes. Email billing@bemoreswan.com and we'll move you across and account for the part of the month you've already paid for. We'll confirm the exact figures with you in writing before anything is charged — you won't lose time you've already paid for.

Our plans are priced in pounds sterling. The pricing page can show approximate equivalents in US dollars, euros, Australian and Canadian dollars, converted at the European Central Bank's latest rate, to help you compare — but those are indicative — the exact amount and the exact currency you're charged are shown on the checkout page before you confirm payment, and that's the figure that matters. If your card is issued outside the UK, your bank may apply its own conversion rate.

Prices on our pricing page are shown exclusive of VAT. The full amount you'll be charged is always displayed on the checkout page before you confirm payment. You can store your legal company name, address and VAT/Tax ID in Billing so they appear on your invoices. If you need a specific VAT treatment for your jurisdiction — a reverse charge, for example — email billing@bemoreswan.com before you subscribe and we'll sort it out with you directly.

Every payment generates an invoice automatically, and your full invoice history is available to download from the Billing section of your workspace at any time. Add your legal company name, address and VAT/Tax ID under Business Information first and they'll appear on every invoice we issue from then on.

We'll email you immediately if a payment doesn't go through, and your account enters a 7-day grace period during which everything keeps running normally while you update your card. If it still hasn't resolved after that, your assistants stop working — but your data, settings and drafts are fully preserved. As soon as a payment succeeds, everything picks back up exactly where it left off.

Yes — if you're going quiet for a season or just don't need the output for a while, choose Pause my account when you go to cancel on the Billing page. Your assistants keep working until the end of the period you've paid for, then billing stops and nothing more is charged. Your workspace, brand settings and content are kept exactly as they are, so when you're ready, choose a plan from the Billing page and pick up where you left off.

From the Billing page in your workspace, in a few clicks — no notice period, no cancellation fees, and nobody will try to keep you on a call. Your assistants keep working until the end of the period you've already paid for. Cancelling stops future billing; it doesn't delete your data, so if you also want your workspace erased see What happens to my data if I cancel? below.

We do. You get a personal referral link from your workspace, and it's give a month, get a month. Your friend gets their first paid month free, and every friend who becomes a paying customer earns you a free month of your own plan, taken off your next bill. There's no cap, no sales call, and you can track each referral from the Refer a Friend page in your workspace. Full details on the Referral Program page.

Your workspace's data is kept separate from every other customer's — it is never pooled with, or visible to, anyone else — and each assistant only uses the connections you choose to give it. Everything is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256), the OAuth credentials connecting your business tools get an additional layer of AES-256-GCM encryption and are never logged or returned to a browser, and payments are handled entirely by Stripe (we never see your card details). The full detail, including our sub-processor list, is in the Trust & Security Center.

Every assistant is governed by the Be More Swan Safe Content Benchmark — brand-safety rules built into every assistant. They are applied at the highest priority in every instruction your assistant receives, ahead of your own instructions, and can't be switched off in settings. It's included on every plan, and combined with the review queue it means you stay in control of what carries your name.

Only if you explicitly configure it that way. By default every output waits in your review queue until you approve it. Once you're confident in the output quality you can switch specific workflows to publish automatically — and even then there are conditions that always force a human review, such as anything using an AI-generated image. You can turn automatic publishing off again at any time.

No. Your data — including any emails, documents, messages, or content your assistant handles — is never used to train public AI models or shared with third parties for model development. That's not just our policy: our contracts with the AI providers we use carry an explicit no-training-on-API-data clause. What happens in your workspace stays in your workspace.

We build on leading commercial foundation models rather than training our own from scratch, accessed through their business APIs under data processing agreements. Anthropic's models do the main work — drafting, chat, and quality review. We also use OpenAI for content moderation screening and tour narration, a specialist provider for AI image and video generation, and Stability AI for AI music. That means you get frontier-quality output, and we can move to a better model as they improve without you having to do anything. Each provider, what it processes and the legal basis for the transfer is listed in our Privacy Policy, and a full sub-processor register is available on request.

In normal operations, no human at Be More Swan reads your connected app data. Access is handled programmatically by the assistant — software, not staff, is doing the reading and writing. The only exception is if you raise a support ticket and grant us temporary, scoped permission to investigate a specific issue. Even then, access is logged in an immutable audit trail, time-limited, and confined to the minimum data needed to resolve your problem.

Your workspace database is hosted in the UK/EEA. Being straight with you: some processing does happen outside the UK, because the AI model providers, our payment processor and our email provider are US-based. Those transfers run under Standard Contractual Clauses (or the UK–US Data Privacy Framework in Stripe's case), backed by a documented Transfer Impact Assessment and data minimisation on what's sent to model APIs. Every sub-processor, its location and its transfer basis is listed in our Privacy Policy. If you're in a regulated industry with strict residency requirements, talk to us first.

Yes — it's your data and your right under GDPR. Go to My Account → My Agreements → Your data and press Export my data. Within a minute or two you get a machine-readable (JSON) file with a secure download link, valid for 24 hours and emailed to you as well. The workspace owner or an admin gets the whole workspace — assistants, posts, blogs, leads, audience, email, campaigns, products, goals, connections and billing records — and every team member can export their own account records. Exports are limited to one a day. If you'd rather ask, email privacy@bemoreswan.com from your account address. Separately, you can download your Audience contacts as an Excel file at any time from the Audience page.

Cancelling your subscription and deleting your data are two separate things, deliberately. Cancelling stops the billing and stops your assistants; your workspace and content stay put in case you come back or need to export something. When you ask us to delete your account, there's a 24-hour cooling-off window with a cancel link in case it was a mistake, after which your assistants, connections, drafts and published-post records are erased — permanently completed within 30 days, as UK GDPR requires. We keep only an anonymised record of the erasure itself and anything we're legally required to retain, such as billing history. Posts already published to your own social accounts stay live on those platforms; only you can remove those. Full detail on the Data Deletion page.

Yes. If you're processing your own customers' personal data through Be More Swan, you may need a DPA in place for GDPR compliance. Every agreement you've accepted with us — terms, privacy, DPA and the responsible AI use agreement — is listed with its version and date under My Account → My Agreements in your workspace. To request our standard DPA, or to negotiate a custom one as an Enterprise customer, email privacy@bemoreswan.com.