Frequently asked questions
Everything we get asked in early access. Missing one? Use Contact us.
What is AcornReply?
A support inbox for small teams (under 10 people) who still answer their own customer email. AI drafts a reply built from your help center and your past replies; a human edits and sends. No bot pretending to be a person.
How much does it cost?
Free is $0/month: up to 500 outbound emails per month and your first 20 AI drafts to try. Pro is $20/month flat for the whole account with unlimited drafts and outbound emails. Premium is $30/month and adds branding control: hide or replace the "Powered by AcornReply" footer on both your hosted contact form and outbound emails. Plans are billed per account, not per seat, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel any time from Settings → Billing.
Is it secure?
Sign-in uses Google SSO or an email magic link. Public contact submissions go through a bot-prevention challenge. Inbound webhook signatures are verified with a shared secret. We don't sell or share customer data.
Where is my data stored?
On Postgres in the US. Each workspace's data is row-isolated and queries are scoped by workspace ID. There is no cross-tenant access path.
How do I sign in?
Three ways: email and password, Google, or a one-time code sent to your email. As long as the same email is used, it's the same account no matter how you sign up. You can set up or change your password any time in Settings → Profile → Password.
What happens right after signup?
You name your workspace and pick a slug. That slug becomes both your inbound forwarding address and your hosted contact URL. Then you pick a reply voice. Then you're in the inbox. Teammates invited after this skip the create step and land straight in the inbox.
What's the difference between an organization, a workspace, a conversation, and a message?
An organization owns billing and members, usually one per company. A workspace is a single inbox inside that organization; teams running multiple brands or products can spin up more than one. Every customer thread in a workspace is a conversation, and each email or form submission inside it is a message.
What's the difference between admin and member roles?
Admins manage billing, members, and workspace settings: name, voice, embed snippets. Members focus on the inbox: read conversations, edit drafts, send replies. Both roles see every conversation in the workspaces they belong to.
How do customers reach us?
Email, live chat, and a web form — plus a developer API. All feed the same inbox. Every reply goes out from your workspace's address, not AcornReply's.
- Email. Anything sent to
support@{workspace-slug}.acornreply.comlands in your inbox. Publish it directly, or forward an existing support address to it. Your exact address is on Settings → Channels. - Live chat. A real-time chat bubble in the bottom-right of your site. Replies appear instantly; if the visitor leaves before you respond, the conversation continues by email. Visitors can also attach a screenshot or small file. Paste the snippet from Settings → Channels. To identify your visitor (optional), call
AcornReply("identify", { email: "[email protected]", name: "Name", plan: "Pro" })once you know who they are — on page load or after login — so the chat skips the email prompt and your team sees the visitor in the sidebar. Reserved keys areemail,name, andexternalId; any other field becomes sidebar metadata. These values come from the browser and are unverified. - Web form — three placements. One contact form, three ways to surface it:
- Hosted page. Share the public link
https://{workspace-slug}.acornreply.com/contact. Copy it from Settings → Channels. - Inline iframe. Drop the form directly into a page of your site. Copy the single
<script>tag from Settings → Channels. It injects the iframe where you paste it, auto-resizes to fit, and tracks your site's light/dark theme. - Launcher button. Paste a single
<script>tag from Settings → Channels. A small indigo button appears in the bottom-right of every page; clicking it opens the contact form. Adddata-hide-buttonto hide the built-in button and open the form from any element on your page by callingwindow.AcornReply("open")in its click handler.
On any of these, visitors can attach a screenshot or small file.
- Hosted page. Share the public link
- Developer API. Create conversations programmatically from your own product or tooling. See Settings → Channels → API for your key and endpoint.
The web form and live chat each render in light or dark to match the visitor, either following your host site's dark-mode toggle or their OS preference. You can also pin a fixed theme via the Match site / Light only / Dark only control at the top of Settings → Channels.
Can customers attach files or screenshots?
Yes. On live chat and the contact form, customers can attach images — a screenshot of the problem, a photo — and small text files like logs or CSVs (up to 3 files, 5 MB each). They can even paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard. We deliberately accept images and text only — no executables, documents, or archives — and re-encode images on upload, which strips location and device metadata for the sender's privacy. Files appear right in the conversation. Customers emailing you can attach files the usual way.
How do I forward email from Gmail or Outlook?
In Gmail: Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP → add the forwarding address from Settings → Workspace (it looks like [email protected]). Confirm the verification email when it lands in your AcornReply inbox, then turn on the forward rule. In Outlook: Inbox → Rules → forward to the same address. The same address works for any provider that supports forwarding.
What address do my outbound replies come from?
Replies are sent from a per-conversation address on your workspace's domain. The display name is whatever you set as 'From display name' in Settings → Workspace, so the customer sees a normal email from your team, not from AcornReply. Replies they send back land in the same conversation automatically.
What do open, snoozed, and resolved mean?
Open is the default work state. Snoozed hides a conversation until a chosen time or until the customer replies. Either event auto-reopens it. Resolved locks the thread so you stop seeing it, and you can reopen it any time; an inbound reply reopens it automatically too.
How does assignment work?
Every conversation can have one assignee (the teammate currently on it) or be unassigned (shown by a dashed circle on the row). When a returning customer writes in, the conversation is automatically handed to whoever on your team last replied to them, so the same person stays on the thread; sending a reply also claims any unassigned conversation for you. Tap the assignee chip on a row, or in the conversation header, to open the picker: "Assign to me", any teammate, or "Unassign". The Mine filter at the top of the inbox shows just the ones assigned to you, and everyone still sees every conversation. Assignment is about who is on it, not who can access it.
How do I turn on notifications?
Open Settings → Notifications. Pick a workspace, then choose how you want to hear about it: email, web push, or both. There are two events you can subscribe to ("New and unassigned customer message" and "Snoozed conversation wakes"), and you flip them independently per workspace. Web push runs per-device: install AcornReply as a PWA on your phone, allow notifications when prompted, and you'll get push alerts on that device; the same browser on your laptop counts as its own device too. Each device shows up under its own row, so you can rename it, turn it off, or remove it without touching your other devices.
Who gets notified when a customer message arrives?
It depends on whether the conversation is assigned:
- Assigned to someone. Only that person is notified, and only through the channels they've turned on. Other teammates aren't pinged about a thread that already has an owner.
- Unassigned. Everyone in the workspace who turned on New and unassigned customer message gets pinged. As soon as someone replies (which auto-claims the thread) or picks it up via Assign to me, future messages on that conversation go only to that assignee.
Snoozed-conversation wakes always go to the assignee, and snoozing a conversation that doesn't have an assignee yet auto-assigns it to you, so the wake-up has somewhere to land. Snoozing one that's already assigned to someone else leaves it with them.
How does the AI draft my replies, and is my customer data safe?
When a customer writes in, AcornReply uses the help articles and FAQs you've added to your workspace to compose a draft reply for you to review.
- The draft is grounded in your material. You'll see exactly which of your articles were used, listed right under each draft. If the AI can't find anything relevant in your knowledge base, it will ask a clarifying question rather than guess.
- You're always the one who sends. Drafts wait for you to read, edit, and approve. Nothing goes out until you click send.
- If we're not confident the draft is accurate, you'll see a "Couldn't fully verify, please check before sending" notice. That's a cue to read carefully before sending.
About your data: composing a draft involves sending the customer's message and the relevant snippets from your knowledge base to a trusted AI provider. Your conversations aren't used to train AI models or shared with anyone else, and they stay scoped to your workspace.
How does the AI learn my voice?
During onboarding you pick a built-in voice profile, the one closest to how you actually write. From then on, every reply you send quietly tunes the profile toward your real voice, so drafts read more like you over time. You can switch profiles any time from settings.
What if the AI draft is wrong?
You can rewrite it directly in the textarea, regenerate a fresh draft, or discard it and type from scratch. Nothing sends until you press Send. There's no autonomous reply.
How do I search the inbox?
Type three or more characters into the search bar at the top of the inbox, or press / from anywhere on the inbox to jump straight there.
Search looks across every conversation in the workspace you can access:
- customer name and email
- message subject
- the body of every message in the thread (not just the most recent one)
Matches are highlighted in the list, and the most relevant body snippet appears under each row so you can see why it matched without opening it. The active status tab scopes results. A query under Open only shows open conversations; switch to All to search across every status (including resolved and snoozed).
Opening a result keeps your search active. The list pane stays filtered to the same hits with the conversation you opened marked as current, so you can click through several results without retyping. Clearing the box (the × in the search bar, or Esc) drops the filter and returns to the normal inbox.
Keyboard: / focuses the search, ↓ steps into the result list, ↑/↓ walks between rows, Enter opens the highlighted row, Esc clears.
How do I invite teammates?
Settings → Members → Invite teammate. Enter their email and send. They get a magic-link invite by email. Everyone joins as a member; promote them to admin from the same Settings → Members page after they accept. Admins manage members, billing, and workspace settings; members focus on the inbox.
Can I change the avatar that shows next to my name?
Yes. Open Settings → Profile → Identity → Change avatar. Pick a photo from your computer (or take one with your phone camera), crop it square, and save. It appears everywhere your name shows up: the Mine button at the top of the inbox, assignee chips, the top-right account menu. If you signed in with Google, your Google profile photo is used by default; click Disable to fall back to your initials, or upload your own. Uploads always win over the Google photo. Remove your upload to go back to the Google photo (or your initials if you've disabled it). PNG, JPEG, or WebP, up to 256 KB after cropping.
Can I customize how the contact form and live-chat widget look?
Yes. Open Settings → Branding, enter your website URL, and click Detect brand. We pull your logo, favicon, social image, and primary color from the site and show a preview on the right; click Save changes to apply, or Drop to discard. After saving you can still override individual tokens (form background and text, button background, chat bubble background and icon, header logo, and font family) separately for light and dark modes. Premium accounts can additionally customize the "Powered by AcornReply" footer on both the contact form and outbound emails: replace it with your own image, or hide it entirely. Which of those two palettes visitors see is controlled by the Match site / Light only / Dark only toggle on Settings → Channels: Match site follows your host site's dark-mode toggle, or the visitor's OS if your site doesn't have one. The Branding page also has a workspace avatar picker that auto-saves and shows next to the workspace name in the workspace switcher.
I changed my branding but the contact form still shows the old style. Why?
Saved changes need to be published. The hosted contact form (your subdomain /contact, the apex /contact/{embedKey} embed, and the /embed/{embedKey}.js JavaScript snippet) is edge-cached by CDN for up to 24 hours, so visitors keep hitting the cached version until you click Publish on the Branding page. Publish purges the cache for this workspace's URLs only. Within a few seconds, new visitors see the new theme.
What happens if I rename my workspace?
Your inbox keeps working. We remember every slug a workspace has used, so the old inbound forwarding address and the old hosted contact URL keep routing to the same inbox. Update your forwarding rules whenever it suits you.
Is there a mobile app?
AcornReply is a PWA. Open it on your phone and use 'Add to Home Screen' (iOS) or 'Install app' (Android). Once installed it opens full-screen like any other app. Swipe right on a conversation to snooze, swipe left to resolve.
Can I cancel and export my data?
Yes. You can delete your account from settings any time; all conversations and customers are removed. Exporting your inbox to JSON is available on request during early access and self-serve at launch.