Frequently Asked Questions
Straight answers for people who keep their network deliberately - founders, consultants, and anyone who would rather nurture relationships than run growth-hacks.
Assay is a personal CRM for staying in touch with the people who matter - clients, collaborators, former colleagues, the friends of your business. You import the people you already know, sort them by how close you are, and Assay reminds you when it's time to reconnect, then drafts a personal message so reaching out takes seconds rather than willpower.
It is built for genuine one-to-one relationships, not for blasting a list.
Assay is not a cold-email sequencer, not a LinkedIn automation bot, and not a heavyweight sales CRM. It will not auto-send messages on your behalf or pretend a stranger is a close contact.
You stay in control of who you reach out to, what gets sent, and when.
Assay starts with your template, the contact record, your relationship tier, and the research it has already gathered. The AI personalises the draft so it's grounded in a real relationship instead of a generic script.
If context is thin, Assay leaves placeholders rather than inventing facts. You still review, edit, and send the final message yourself, and capture what you actually said so that Assay can learn how your drafts change over time.
That edit history feeds a weekly retrospective: a look at how consistently you're staying in touch and where your messages can improve. Over time, Assay gets better at writing in your voice.
Contacts, grades, notes, and message history are stored in an encrypted database with row-level security, so your data is isolated to your workspace - no other users can access it.
Your data is processed by Anthropic's API to generate drafts and run enrichment. We don't sell it or share it beyond what's needed to run the product. For full detail on what's processed and why, see our Privacy Policy.
No. Assay asks for a single Google scope - contacts.readonly - which lets it read your Google Contacts and nothing else. It cannot open your inbox, read message content, or see who you email, because that permission is never requested.
What you get is the address book you have already curated, imported as contacts you can then grade. Everything about the relationship after that - calls, coffees, notes, check-ins - is what you log yourself.
You can disconnect Google at any time from Account, and the contacts you have already imported stay put.
LinkedIn changes the menu labels from time to time, but the flow is usually:
- Open LinkedIn, then go to Settings & Privacy.
- Find the Data privacy section and choose Get a copy of your data.
- Request your Connections export and wait for LinkedIn to email the file.
- Download the CSV, then upload it in Assay from the CSV Upload tab.
Assay works best when the file includes name, email, company, and LinkedIn URL. If the export has extra columns, that is fine - Assay will ignore what it does not need.
Trace is the free entry point for trying Assay properly. You can import contacts by CSV, sort your network, get stay-in-touch reminders, and generate AI-assisted check-in drafts without paying.
The free tier includes up to 25 contacts and 10 check-ins per month. Gmail import and unlimited usage start on Seam.
Context is where you feed Assay unstructured material about the people in your network - the kind of stuff you would normally type into a notes field manually. You upload a file, Assay reads it, and it writes a structured summary back against the matching contact so that future drafts can draw on it.
A few examples of what works well: meeting notes, a screenshot of an article or interview, a conference bio PDF, a LinkedIn post screenshot, or your LinkedIn messages CSV export. If it is about a person in your network and you want to remember it, it's probably good Context.
Every extracted piece of context is matched to your existing contacts through a hybrid rule-based + AI approach. Matches with high confidence are treated as definitive and auto-applied. Weaker matches are held in a review queue so you can pick the right one or reject the proposal.
Nothing gets written to a contact record until you confirm, except for those definitive matches.
Files are stored securely and encrypted at rest and in-transit, read only by the extraction task that processes them, and deleted when you delete the upload or close your account. The content is sent to our AI provider during extraction under the same data terms as the rest of Assay (see the Privacy Policy).
If you hit the Trace cap, Assay pauses additional imports or marked-sent check-ins until you upgrade. Your existing contacts, grades, notes, and history stay exactly where they are - nothing gets deleted.
Upgrading unlocks more volume immediately. Seam removes the contact and monthly check-in limits, and higher plans add the extra features shown on the pricing page.