How Starts Now works

Overview

Starts Now lets any business add an AI chatbot to its website without writing code. You point it at your website, it learns your content, and you embed a small script tag to go live. The chatbot answers visitor questions using your content only — and captures leads when visitors show interest.

The core promise is grounded answers: the bot replies from your material, and when a question falls outside what it has learned, it tells the visitor it doesn't have enough information rather than inventing an answer.

Features

Trained on your website

The crawler reads your pages and indexes them using Google Gemini embeddings, so answers come from your actual content rather than a generic model.

Grounded answers, no hallucination

Responses are generated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over your content. The system is instructed to answer only from that context and to admit when it doesn't know.

Lead capture with scoring

Conversations are scored for buying intent. When a visitor is interested, the bot can collect their name, email, and phone number, and leads appear in your dashboard with a score and status.

Document upload

Add knowledge the crawler can't reach by uploading text, Markdown, or Word files. They are indexed alongside your website content.

Customizable widget

Set the bot name, welcome message, input placeholder, primary color, and position, and pin exact answers for common questions.

How training works

When you submit your website URL, Starts Now crawls pages within your domain, following links and prioritizing high-value pages such as FAQ, about, contact, pricing, and product pages. It skips pages like cart, checkout, and login. The text is extracted, split into chunks, and converted into Gemini vector embeddings for fast, relevant retrieval.

How many pages are crawled depends on your plan (see Pricing & limits). You can re-crawl at any time to pick up content changes. Crawling and indexing usually take a few minutes, depending on the size of your site.

Uploading documents

In addition to crawling your website, you can upload documents to expand what your chatbot knows. Supported file types are plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md), and Word (.docx). Each file can be up to 500 KB. PDF files are not currently supported. The number of documents per chatbot depends on your plan.

Embedding the widget

Once your chatbot is trained, copy the script tag from your dashboard and paste it just before the closing </body> tag on your website. The widget loads a chat button in the corner of your site and works on any platform — WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, or custom HTML. You can optionally restrict which domains are allowed to load your widget.

Customization

From the chatbot settings you can configure the bot name and display name, the welcome message shown when the chat opens, the input placeholder, the primary color, and the widget position (left or right). You can also pin exact answers — for example a precise pricing or contact response — so they're always returned for matching questions. Paid plans can remove the Starts Now branding.

Lead capture

The chatbot detects buying intent by scoring messages for signals such as pricing questions, contact requests, feature questions, and purchase intent, along with engagement and message length. When a conversation passes your configured threshold, the bot can ask for the visitor's name, email, and phone number (each field is optional and configurable per chatbot). Captured leads are saved with a score and a status and are visible in your dashboard.

Pricing & limits

Exact plans, prices, and limits:

A message is counted per assistant response. The Starter plan is intended for testing. The Custom plan's message volume is set by an admin after you request it. See the pricing page for full feature lists.

Billing & upgrades

Billing is handled manually via Payoneer invoice. To upgrade, request a plan from your dashboard; the team sends you a Payoneer invoice and activates your plan once payment is confirmed. There are no long-term contracts — you can cancel at any time, and your plan remains active until the end of the billing period. For a custom message volume, request the Custom plan and the team will set your pricing.

Data & security

Your content and conversations are stored in Supabase, with data encrypted in transit and at rest and row-level security isolating each account's data. The website crawler is protected against fetching private or internal network addresses, and rate limiting protects your chatbot from abuse. AI embeddings and responses are processed by Google Gemini. You can read more in our Privacy Policy.

Support

Questions? Email support@startsnow.site or visit the contact page. We typically respond within 24 hours.