Honest answers, including the parts the marketing instinct says to soften.
What if I outgrow Starter?+
Click the upgrade button in Settings → Billing — your channels, brand voice, agents, customer profiles, and audit history all carry forward. No migration. No data export-and-reimport. The same workspace, more headroom. Honest hedge: if you're already running 3+ brands, skip to Agency on day one — it's cheaper than running three Starter workspaces and the multi-brand UI is the difference between a workaround and a first-class product.
Why doesn't this page show exact dollar amounts for Growth, Agency, and Enterprise?+
Because pricing for those tiers is calibrated to your channel volume, BYOK profile, residency requirements, and which Bench agents you install. We'd rather have a 5-minute call than ship a number that misleads you. The Starter price is fixed and public; the rest scales with what you actually use.
Is there really no credit card for the trial?+
No credit card. 14 days. Cancel anytime. The platform is multi-tenant by design (PostgreSQL Row-Level Security on every table) — your data is architecturally isolated whether you've paid yet or not.
Can I bring my own LLM key?+
Yes — BYOK is on Growth and above. Currently OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral with rotation, revoke, and structural test-fire. AWS Bedrock + Azure OpenAI ship in v1.10.0 (honest hedge — we're not pretending it's there yet).
What channels are included at each tier?+
Every tier includes every channel — WhatsApp Cloud API, Telegram Bot API, web chat (embeddable widget), email (IMAP/SMTP), web forms (drop-in JS), WordPress plugin, custom API (REST + Webhooks), MCP server. Starter caps at 1 of each; Growth and above are unlimited. Voice / Instagram / SMS adapters via Starter Kits AB land at Growth.
Are you SOC 2 certified?+
Not yet. SOC 2 Type 1 audit is scheduled for Q3 2026. We are architecturally aligned with SOC 2 controls today — designed-aligned, not third-party-attested. We will never claim certified before we are. The same honest framing applies to ISO 27001 (planned, not certified). For everything else — GDPR · PIPEDA · HIPAA · PHIPA · EU AI Act Article 13 · CCPA · AODA — we are scoped + design-aligned, with the architectural evidence published in the public Trust Center.
Can I see the per-decision audit trail before I buy?+
Yes. Sign up for the trial, send a test message through, and click the Why? button on any AI output. You'll see the framework chain, citations from your knowledge base, confidence score, model used, latency, and cost — pulled from /v1/decisions/{id}/explain. The same endpoint is what your regulator will see when they ask.
How long does setup actually take?+
Live in hours, not weeks. Sign-up → KYC (Step 1, banking-grade) → 5 setup steps (brand voice extraction · channel connection wizard · KB ingestion · team invites · Bench picks). The moment Step 6 is done, ARIA starts processing inbound. No engineering team required.
What if I need data residency outside Canada?+
Enterprise tier ships with Postgres + Redis + Qdrant deployable in your jurisdiction — Canada, EU, US, AU on request. We don't pretend other regions are one-click ready when they require a real conversation. Tell us where, and we'll quote it.
Is the platform built by Maxim?+
ARIA is built by Simplification.io in Canada. Maxim is the internal agent system that helps us ship — it lives in the schema.org JSON-LD entity graph for SEO crawlers, not in customer-facing copy. Builder credit you'll see across the product is Built by Simplification.io 🍁.