Questions and answers

What New Homestead does, and who it is for

What does New Homestead do?

It drafts the routine messages an owner-operated business owes people, and puts each draft in a queue for someone at the business to read. You approve it, edit it first, or throw it away. It reads what it needs from the accounts you choose to connect, and it does nothing with a draft until it has been authorised (see "The approval rule" below).

What jobs does it do today?

Three, to start with:

• Overdue invoice reminders. It reads which invoices are past due in QuickBooks Online and drafts a reminder to each customer, in a tone that depends on how late the bill is.
• Following up new enquiries. When a new lead arrives, it drafts a reply that refers to what the person asked, and says you will confirm details rather than inventing a price or a date.
• A weekly brief for you. A short summary of where the business stands. It is delivered to you inside the app rather than sent to anyone, so there is nothing to approve.

Other jobs of the same shape are added one at a time and turned on for a business deliberately. Nothing is described here before it works.

Who is it for?

Owner-operated local businesses, typically under about ten people, where the owner would otherwise write these messages themselves. You do not need anyone technical on staff. Getting set up is a conversation with the operator, not a signup form.

Can a new account send messages straight away?

No. A new account runs with delivery switched off: drafts are written and recorded, but the part that would hand a message to a mail server is not connected. It stays that way until a checklist covering your connections, your data and your people is complete, and the owner has recorded in their own account that they want to go live.

What is the Ask tab, and why can't I see it?

Ask answers questions about your own business data, such as what is outstanding or what a job did, and says so when it cannot answer rather than guessing. It is switched per workspace, and it needs two switches on: your operator's and your owner's. Both are on to begin with.

An owner can turn Ask off, or back on, from the Ask section of the Profile tab. With it off, the tab goes away for everyone in the workspace and no questions are sent to the AI model. If the section says Ask isn't enabled for this workspace, your operator has turned it off, and only they can turn it back on. Members see the setting but cannot change it.

The approval rule

Can it send a message nobody at my business authorised?

No. Unless an owner has chosen otherwise for a job (see the next question), every draft waits in your queue for a person at your business to approve it: not after a delay, not because nobody answered, not because it judged the message routine. A draft nobody authorised has no way to reach anyone outside your business.

Is there any way a message goes out without a click?

One, and only if you choose it. If you would rather not click for every message from a particular job, an owner, and only an owner, signed in to their own account, can let that one job send the messages that pass its safety checks. That decision is recorded, it applies to that job alone, and it can be undone. Anything that trips a check still stops and waits for you: for example the first message this product sends a person, an unusually large amount, or words like refund, dispute or complaint. Every job starts out asking you about every message, and there is no setting that switches this on for every job at once.

Can my operator approve on my behalf?

No. The person who runs New Homestead can see and configure your account, and each time they act in it that is written into your own record. They cannot press approve, they cannot switch a job to sending without a click, and they cannot give themselves a login on your business.

What happens if I never answer a draft?

Nothing is sent. Reminders about it may get louder, but none of them can approve it. If an approval request is left unanswered for a year it ends as expired, not as sent.

Can a link in an email or notification approve something?

No. Approving requires being signed in. A notification may contain a link that takes you to the app; the link on its own decides nothing.

Is rejecting a draft a problem?

No. Rejecting is a normal outcome. The draft is not sent, and the decision is recorded in your done trail like an approval.

Your data

What does it read, and why?

Only what the Google and QuickBooks permissions below allow. Here is every permission it requests, the exact scope string, and what it is used for:

The step-by-step guide to connecting and disconnecting your accounts explains each permission again.

How is my data protected?

Everything stored for your business is encrypted at rest by the platform it runs on, and everything sent between services travels over encrypted connections. The credentials that let it reach your Google or QuickBooks account are additionally encrypted field by field, under a key specific to your business.

Do the AI providers keep what I send them?

The AI providers it routes to don't retain your data where they support that (currently Anthropic and OpenAI). We keep our own request and response logs for quality and support, and they are kept on the same terms as everything else below.

How long is my data kept?

Nothing is deleted for age while your account is active. Records older than a year drop out of the default views, such as the done trail, but they stay in the database and can still be shown when needed. New Homestead is not your system of record: QuickBooks and Google remain that, and this product only reflects what it read from them.

Can I delete a single record?

Not while your account is active. The history of what was drafted, approved and sent is kept whole, because that record is the evidence of what the product did. Deleting your data means ending the account, as described below.

How do I get a copy of my data?

Ask the operator. The export is a complete file of everything held for your business, and it is produced by the operator on request rather than by a button in the app. The guide to exporting your data has the details.

What happens when I leave?

When your contract ends, everything is kept for at least thirty days so it can be exported to you in full. Only after that window can it be deleted, and deletion removes it in full. If you want it deleted sooner, you can ask; an earlier deletion needs a stated reason and leaves a record that it happened.

The AI, what it costs, and the figures you see

Which AI does it use?

Large language models from commercial AI providers, called through Cloudflare's AI Gateway. Which model drafts which job is chosen by testing candidate models side by side against the same example scenarios, and the choice is revisited as the product's instructions change. A model only ever writes a draft. Whether that draft is sent is decided by the approval rule, never by the model.

Do the AI providers keep my data?

The providers it routes to don't retain your data where they support that (currently Anthropic and OpenAI). The full answer, and how long our own logs are kept, is under "Your data" above.

What are the figures at the top of the app?

A small strip showing two figures for the current period, with the date the period started:

• Time saved (modelled). A model, not a measurement: the number of completed runs of each job multiplied by a set number of minutes per run. The arithmetic is shown underneath, so you can check it by hand and land on the same number.
• Cost (est.). The estimated cost of the AI calls made for your business, shown against your account's spending limit. It is estimated from the amount of text sent and received, not taken from a bill. Calls that have not been priced yet are counted and named rather than left to look free.

What does "paid after a reminder" mean?

For overdue invoices, the app may show how many invoices were paid within a set number of days of an approved, delivered reminder. That is a statement that the two things happened close together, not a claim that the reminder caused the payment: an invoice paid a few days later might have been paid anyway. Until there are enough invoices for the figure to mean anything, it is not shown.

Is the spending limit a hard cap?

Treat it as a guardrail rather than an exact ceiling. Costs are estimates recorded after each call, so a burst of work can run slightly past the limit before it takes effect.

Pricing and support

How much does it cost?

There is no price list on this site. What it costs depends on which jobs you want doing, so pricing is worked out with you: write to support@newhomestead.ai.

Is there a free trial or a signup form?

There is no self-serve signup. Starting is a conversation about whether any of this is useful for what your business actually does.

Who runs New Homestead?

New Homestead is built and operated by New Homestead, a one-person consulting business working with owner-operated local businesses. There is no larger organisation behind it.

How do I get help?

Start with this FAQ and the user guide. For anything they do not answer, write to support@newhomestead.ai. It reaches the operator directly. There is no ticket system, no phone queue and no chat widget on this site; if you write, a person reads it.