Question 1

Do I need a website from you to use this?

Accepted Answer

No. A site of ours feeds enquiries straight in, which is the tidiest route, but you can add customers and record work by hand and never publish a page with us.

Question 2

What do my customers have to install or sign up for?

Accepted Answer

Nothing. They open a link you send them and they are in — no account, no password, no app. If they lose the link you send another.

Question 3

Can it use my trade's words instead of yours?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Services, jobs, customers and products can each be renamed for your organisation, and the customer portal uses your names too — a portal headed “Jobs” for a piano student is us showing through, and that is a bug rather than a style.

Question 4

Who holds the money when a customer pays?

Accepted Answer

You do. Payments settle into your organisation's own Stripe account and you are the merchant of record. We connect the account; the funds never pass through us.

Question 5

Is the community side available yet?

Accepted Answer

The first part is: a roster of people who agreed to be on it, scrims with results, announcements and sign-ups in your Discord server, and vouching. It is on the Pro plan, and we run it for our own community on the same code. Teams, leagues and seasons are not built yet, and we will say when they are rather than before.

Question 6

Which plan includes it?

Accepted Answer

Every plan includes a hosted site. Free publishes at your-name.sites.illustrious.cloud; Pro adds your own domain, with certificates issued and renewed for you. The pricing page has the rest of what each plan holds.

Question 7

Do I have to use your site to use the rest?

Accepted Answer

No. A site of ours feeds enquiries straight into the dashboard, which is the tidiest route, but customers, scheduling, invoicing and the rest work without one.

Question 8

Can I leave?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Downgrading deletes nothing, and you can ask for a copy of your content at any time. Your domain is yours; you point it somewhere else.

Question 9

Will you promise it ranks?

Accepted Answer

No, and nobody honest will. What we do is make each page clearly about the thing it is about and keep the site technically sound; the search page describes how we report on that.

Question 10

Which plan includes it?

Accepted Answer

Free includes the contact form and your first 25 enquiries. Pro removes the limit and adds the customers, scheduling and invoicing they turn into.

Question 11

What happens to enquiries past 25 on Free?

Accepted Answer

They are kept for you, and open again the moment you upgrade. Nothing is discarded.

Question 12

Where does the enquiry go?

Accepted Answer

It is stored here and emailed to you. Spam filtering uses Google reCAPTCHA on the form; the content of the enquiry is not sold or shared.

Question 13

Which plan includes it?

Accepted Answer

Pro. Invoicing, card payment, the customer portal and reports are the business half of the product, and that is what Pro is.

Question 14

Who holds the money?

Accepted Answer

You do. Payments settle into your organisation's own Stripe account and you are the merchant of record. We connect the account; the funds never pass through us.

Question 15

Can my customers pay without a card?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Set payment instructions — bank transfer details, say — and they appear with the invoice. When the money arrives, you mark the invoice paid.

Question 16

Which plan includes it?

Accepted Answer

Pro. A Free site is still crawlable and still has a sitemap; the Search Console connection, readiness reporting and sitemap monitoring are Pro.

Question 17

What access to Google do you take?

Accepted Answer

Search Console only — to read performance data and manage your sitemap — plus the email address of the account that connected, so the dashboard can say which one it is. You can revoke it from your Google account at any time.

Question 18

Do you handle Google Business Profile?

Accepted Answer

Not yet. We have applied for access to the Business Profile API, and we will add it when Google approves it — not before.

Question 19

Which plan includes it?

Accepted Answer

Pro. The roster and standing are part of managing your people; the Discord bot is the community feature Pro adds. We run this for our own community on the same code.

Question 20

Do my members have to install anything?

Accepted Answer

No. You install one bot on your server, once. Members use the buttons and the /vouch command in Discord as they would anything else there.

Question 21

Is it only for games?

Accepted Answer

No. Anything with members, a schedule and results runs on it, and the words are yours to set. Games are where we started because it is our own community.

Question 22

How am I billed?

Accepted Answer

Monthly or annually, starting the day you subscribe, and renewing on the same date. Payments are handled by Stripe — we never see or store your card details.

Question 23

Can I cancel?

Accepted Answer

Any time, from the billing page in your dashboard. Your plan stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for, and it does not renew after that. There is no cancellation fee and no notice period.

Question 24

Do you offer refunds?

Accepted Answer

Yes. If you are not happy within 14 days of your first payment, ask and we will refund it in full. After that, monthly plans are not refunded mid-month — cancel and you keep access until the period ends. Annual plans are refunded pro rata for whole unused months if you cancel early.

Question 25

What happens to my site if I stop paying?

Accepted Answer

Your site keeps working on an illustrious.cloud address, and nothing is deleted. You keep reading what you already have — customers, invoices, reports — you just cannot add new ones until you upgrade again. What stops is your own domain, the search tooling, and recording new work. Enquiries past the free plan's first 25 are kept for you and open again the moment you upgrade.

Question 26

Can I change plans?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in either direction. Switching between monthly and annual, or between Free and Pro, is prorated by Stripe so you only pay the difference.

Question 27

Is there a contract or minimum term?

Accepted Answer

No. Both plans are month to month unless you choose annual billing, and annual is a discount rather than a commitment you cannot leave.

Question 28

What does Agency actually let me do?

Accepted Answer

Hold client organisations and work on their behalf — their site, their search visibility, their reports, and the enquiries that work produces. Not their customers, their billing or their members; those stay with them. Every client agrees to it before it starts, sees exactly what you can do and what you have done, and can end it on their own at any time without asking you.

Question 29

Does my client still need their own plan?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Agency covers your right to work on their organisation; their own plan covers what their organisation can do. A client on the free plan is still on the free plan while you manage them — you cannot spend a capability they have not got.

See what people searched for when they found you

What it does

Search Console, in your dashboard

Readiness, page by page

Sitemap kept honest

Questions