Frequently Asked Questions

Outpost lets you deploy Scouts that run on a schedule and deliver the results to your inbox. Instead of opening the same tabs and asking the same questions every morning (weather, calendar, inbox, news, dashboards), a Scout does it for you and writes a brief.

You describe what you want in plain language; Outpost handles the AI, the scheduling, the integrations, and the delivery.

A Scout is a saved instruction that runs on a schedule (every morning at 7am, every Friday afternoon, hourly, etc.). Each run produces a result that lands in your Outpost Inbox and, if you opt in, an email and a push notification.

Examples of useful Scouts:

• Morning briefing — weather, your calendar, and news on the topics you care about.
• Daily inbox digest that highlights what needs your attention.
• Weekly recap of mentions — your name, your project, a favorite topic — across the web and X.
• Watch a site for changes — a blog you read, a band’s tour dates, a recipe site, an indie shop’s restocks.
• Sunday-night planner that reads your week’s calendar and suggests focus blocks.

Technically, yes — a Scout is an autonomous AI agent. It runs on a schedule, calls the tools it needs (your inbox, your calendar, the web, whatever the task requires), and delivers a result you can act on.

We call them Scouts because the metaphor matches what you’ll actually experience: something goes out on your behalf, gathers intel, and reports back. Same category as other AI agent products; different name because once you have a few running, you’ll think of them as Scouts — purposeful, returning with something useful — not as abstract autonomous software.

People who already use AI assistants but want them to start the work without being asked. If you have multiple sources of information feeding you every day — inboxes, calendars, news, websites you watch — Outpost lets you wake up to a single brief covering whatever you tell it to monitor.

You don’t need to be technical. If you can describe what you want in plain English, Wes (our chat agent) will help you build the Scout.

No. Outpost includes AI inference in your subscription — we manage the AI access, keys, and routing entirely. You never pay an AI provider directly and never paste an API key.

Yes. Every new account gets a 30-day free trial with no payment method required. When the trial ends your Scouts pause — they don’t disappear — until you pick a paid plan.

Click “Deploy a Scout” and chat with Wes, our setup agent. Tell Wes what you want (“every morning at 7am send me the weather, today’s calendar, and three news items on topics I care about”), answer a few clarifying questions, and Wes will assemble the Scout: prompt, schedule, and tools.

You can also start from one of our templates — pre-built Scouts like “Morning Briefing” or “Calendar Prep” that you can deploy with a click and tweak later.

You don’t write the Scout’s prompt yourself — Wes does. Your job is to describe what you want clearly enough that Wes can build a good Scout from it. The clearer you are about three things, the better the result:

• The information sources: which inbox, which calendar, which website, which Drive folder. The more concrete, the better.
• The output you want: a paragraph, a bulleted list, a table, three sections, etc. If you have a format in mind, tell Wes.
• What to skip: “ignore newsletters and marketing emails,” “skip declined meetings,” “don’t include posts older than a week.” Telling Wes what to leave out is often more valuable than telling it what to include.

Don’t worry about getting it perfect on the first try. Wes will ask clarifying questions, and after the Scout is deployed you can chat with Wes to refine it — describe what was wrong with the last run and Wes will adjust.

Yes. Every Scout has a “Test Run” button in the builder that runs the Scout once, immediately, against your real accounts and shows you the result. This is the right way to tune the Scout — describe a change to Wes, test, see the difference, refine.

Yes. Set the schedule type to Manualand the Scout will only run when you click “Run now” from its detail page. Useful for Scouts you want occasionally without the noise of a recurring delivery.

Yes — from the Scout detail page click “Edit” to chat with Wes about changes, or use the inline controls to tweak the schedule, model, or tools directly. Edits are versioned and take effect on the next scheduled run.

Every N minutes, hourly, daily at a specific time, weekly on chosen days, monthly, or manually on demand. All schedules honor your timezone — if you set a Scout for “daily at 7am” and your timezone is America/Chicago, that’s when it runs, regardless of where the worker is hosted.

The result of every run lands in three places (you choose which):

• Outpost Inbox— always, the canonical home for your results. Browseable, searchable, kept for 7 days.
• Email— optional. The Scout result arrives as a styled email at the address on your account.
• Push notification— optional. A web push notification on devices where you’ve allowed notifications.

Seven days. After that we purge the run record and its content to keep your data exposure minimal. If you want a permanent record of a particular result, copy it elsewhere or build a Scout that writes to a service you control (e.g., a Notion page or Drive doc).

Not in the current version. Scouts run in a single account, on that account’s connections, and deliver to that account’s inbox. Team sharing is something we’d like to add but it isn’t scoped for V1.

A connection is a one-time OAuth grant that lets your Scouts read or write to a third-party service on your behalf — Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Notion, Slack, Discord, GitHub, HubSpot, and Stripe. Without a connection, those services are off-limits to your Scouts.

Connections are opt-in and just-in-time: Outpost never asks for them at signup. You only authorize a service when you build a Scout that needs it.

Currently:

• Google— Gmail (read + send + label), Calendar (read + write), Drive (per-file access via Google Picker), plus a private app folder for Scout state.
• Notion— only the pages and databases you explicitly share with the Outpost integration.
• Slack— read channel history and post messages in workspaces you authorize.
• Discord— an Outpost-managed bot you invite to your servers (no OAuth grant needed).
• GitHub— repos, issues, pull requests, notifications.
• HubSpot— contacts, companies, deals (read; contact create + update).
• Stripe— read-only access to your Stripe account.

See our Integrations page for the exact OAuth scopes and per-service data handling.

The minimum needed for the Scout you’re building:

• Gmail: read messages, labels, and threads, and send mail on your behalf. Outpost does not delete email; the “modify” capability is used only to label or archive when a Scout you configure does so.
• Calendar: read and write events on your calendars.
• Drive: only the files or folders you explicitly select via Google’s file picker. Outpost cannot see or list your other Drive files.

You can revoke any connection at any time from the Connections page in Outpost, or directly from myaccount.google.com/permissions.

When you build a Scout that uses Google Drive, Outpost shows you Google’s standard file picker and asks you to select the file(s) or folder(s) for that specific Scout. The Scout can only operate on what you pick — everything else in your Drive is invisible to Outpost.

You can change the selection any time from the Scout’s edit page.

Yes, from the Connections page in your settings. Disconnecting revokes the OAuth token immediately and stops Outpost from acting in that service on your behalf. Any Scouts that depended on the connection will fail until you reconnect — we don’t silently drop their behavior.

That’s fine — many of the most useful Scouts use only Outpost-managed tools that don’t require a connection: web search, web fetch, weather, code sandbox. A morning weather + news briefing, for example, needs zero connections.

Outpost selects and configures the AI for every Scout automatically based on the task at hand. Some Scouts need something fast and cheap; others need deeper reasoning or a larger context window. We make the call so you don’t have to think about it.

No. Our contracts with AI providers prohibit retention or training on your data. Each request is processed and discarded. Outpost itself does not train any AI on your Scouts, results, or any data accessed through your connections.

For Google user data specifically, this is a Limited Use requirement and we comply with it. See our Privacy Policy §9 for the verbatim disclosure.

In the United States, on managed cloud infrastructure (databases, compute, email delivery). All data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest. OAuth tokens for your connections are stored encrypted in a managed secret vault and decrypted only at run time when a Scout calls a third-party API on your behalf.

Scout run results: 7 days. Account data (email, settings, Scout configurations, connection tokens): for the life of your account. When you delete your account, we revoke the associated OAuth tokens and remove your account, Scouts, run history, and credentials from our active systems within 30 days. Limited backups are purged on the same schedule.

Account export is available from the Settings page. You can download a JSON file containing your account profile, Scout configurations, and recent run history (within the 7-day retention window).

Settings → Delete account. Deletion is immediate from active systems, with backup purges completing within 30 days. We revoke the OAuth tokens with each connected provider where their API supports revocation.

Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Integrations & Connector Disclosures.

Every plan includes a number of Scouts, a monthly run allowance, and per-run resource limits. The exact numbers and features are on our Pricing page— we keep that as the source of truth so this FAQ doesn’t drift if we change the offering.

One Scout execution = one run. A daily Scout uses ~30 runs per month. Failed or errored runs do notcount against your allowance — you only pay for successful deliveries.

Your Scouts pause until the start of the next billing period or until you upgrade. We don’t silently overage-charge you.

Yes. Cancellation is one click in the customer portal linked from your settings, takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and your Scouts continue running until that date. No phone calls, no retention surveys, no “wait, let me transfer you” song-and-dance.

We don’t prorate mid-cycle refunds for monthly plans — cancel and you ride out the rest of the period. If something has gone genuinely wrong on our end (a billing bug, an outage that broke your Scouts), email us at hello@getoutpost.io and we’ll make it right.

When your browser supports the Web Push standard (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari 16+) and you allow notifications for Outpost, we send a push when a Scout result arrives. Tapping the notification opens the result in your Outpost Inbox.

Yes — install Outpost as a Progressive Web App on your phone (Add to Home Screen on iOS / Android) and allow notifications. We don’t have native iOS/Android apps yet; the PWA covers the same notification path.

Not currently. SMS adds per-message cost and a separate compliance surface (carrier opt-in handling, STOP codewords, etc.) that we’ve scoped out of V1.

Each Scout has an “Email delivery” toggle in its settings. Turn it on and the result arrives at the email address on your account in addition to the Inbox. Account-level defaults (always email / never email / ask) are in your settings.

Open the failed run in your Inbox — we surface the error message inline. Common causes: a connection token expired, a third-party service was down, the AI provider had a transient outage, or the prompt asked for something unreachable (e.g., reading a Drive file you didn’t pick).

Failed runs do not count against your monthly allowance. The next scheduled run will try again automatically. If the same Scout fails repeatedly, edit it — the error usually points at the fix.

Check, in this order:

• Outpost Inbox— the result is always here first. If it’s not in the Inbox, the Scout didn’t run. Look at the Scout’s detail page for its run history and any error message.
• Email— if email delivery is on but the result didn’t arrive, check spam. We send fromnoreply@getoutpost.io; whitelist if needed.
• Push notification— check that your browser still has notifications allowed for Outpost. Browsers sometimes silently revoke permissions.

The most common cause is a Scout that was set up too open-ended. Open the Scout and chat with Wes — describe what was wrong with the last run (“it included newsletters I didn’t want,” “the summary was too long,” “it missed the email from my accountant”) and Wes will adjust the Scout for the next run.

See “How do I get a good Scout out of Wes?” above for the kinds of details that produce sharper results: which sources, what format, what to skip.

Tokens occasionally expire (a few weeks after the last refresh, or after an explicit revocation on the provider’s side). Open the Connections page, disconnect the affected service, and reconnect. Affected Scouts will resume on their next scheduled run.

Email hello@getoutpost.io. Real humans read it. Include enough context that we can reproduce: what you tried, what you expected, what happened.

A public changelog is on our roadmap; for now, watch this FAQ and our marketing site. Material product changes are also announced via email to active users.

Outpost as a hosted service isn’t open-source today. We’re focused on making the product great and shipping; opening parts of the codebase is something we’d consider later but it isn’t scoped for V1.