Why we gated email alerts to paid plans (and what Noob users get instead)

Most SaaS tools give you everything on the free tier and hope you forget to cancel. Full features for 14 days, then a wall you didn't see coming. We didn't build it that way.

Here's what the tiers actually look like — and why email alerts are where we drew the line.

What Noob gets

The free plan isn't a teaser. It's a real product.

You get the dashboard, up to 10 reviews per month, and 5 AI reply drafts. That's enough to see whether Ominvo fits your workflow before you've spent a dollar. You can read your reviews, generate draft replies, edit them, and approve them. The core loop works.

What you don't get is the moment a review lands. On Noob, you check the dashboard when you remember to. On paid, we come to you.

What Chad and GigaChad get

Upgrade to Chad and the Notifications card in Settings unlocks. From there you can:

• Toggle email alerts on or off
• Set your alert preference — either all reviews, or only 1–3 star reviews

That second option matters more than it sounds. If you run a busy restaurant, getting an email for every five-star is noise. Getting an email for every one-star is signal. The filter lets you tune it.

Instant alerts mean you're looking at a draft reply within minutes of a review landing — not three days later when you happen to open the dashboard. That's the gap Ominvo closes.

Why the gate is where it is

The alert is where the value is.

If a 2-star review sits there for a week before you see it, the AI draft doesn't matter. The damage is already visible to anyone who searched for you. The window for a public reply that shows you took it seriously — that window is gone.

Free tier users can still reply to every review. They can still generate AI drafts. They can still improve their response rate. But they'll do it on their schedule, not the reviewer's. That's the difference.

Digest emails: built, not yet live

The digest email infrastructure — daily and weekly rollups of new reviews — is done. The cron route, the email template, the preference API. It's all in. The Settings card shows it as Coming Soon.

It's parked because it needs an hourly Vercel cron, and that requires Vercel Pro. We're on the hobby tier until we have paying customers. When the first 10 come in, we upgrade, and the Coming Soon badge comes off.

This is one of the few cases where the feature is finished before the infrastructure bill is justified. The UI reflects that honestly rather than hiding it.

The free tier is a test drive

Paid is the product.

Noob exists so you can see the dashboard, try the AI replies, and decide whether this fits before committing. It's a real free tier, not a bait-and-switch — but the thing that makes Ominvo actually solve the problem of missed reviews is the instant alert. That's paid.

If you want to see what a faster response rate is actually worth in revenue terms, the ROI calculator does the math for your specific business. Put in your monthly revenue and see what one extra star translates to.

The gate is where it is because that's where the product starts working.