The questions people ask.
Mostly asked by people about to hand us a URL. If yours isn't here, ask a human.
- Do you need access to our product?
No. If your signup is publicly reachable and doesn't need a card, a ghost user starts at your homepage the way a prospect would — no integration, no install, nothing for your team to stand up.
If you'd rather it ran somewhere else, give it test credentials or a staging URL you put up for the run. Your environment, your call.
- Our signup sits behind an unlisted URL. Does that still work?
Yes. Unlisted is not the same as private. If the page loads without a login, a ghost user can reach it — send the link and it behaves exactly as it would for someone you'd sent it to yourself.
- Is this a recording of a real person's session?
No, and it never is. A ghost user is a model driving a browser. It gets a job to be done, no script and no hints, and it says what it is thinking before each action — which is where the writeups come from.
Personas are built from archetypes, never cloned from a named individual, and every ghost is named something no person is called — Wisp-07, Shade-02 — so a trace cannot be mistaken for somebody's screen recording.
- Who does it sign up as?
An address on a domain we own, reading as the plausible small company it is. Never a real person's identity, never yours, never a competitor's — that would be impersonation, and it would also poison the run.
If someone on your side asks who signed up, we tell them.
- What will it do inside our product?
What a new customer would do, and nothing else. It never enters payment details, never uses a real person's email address, and never wanders off your domain.
It also stops the way a person would. Patience belongs to the persona: a VP with a meeting in twenty minutes gives up long before an ops manager who was told to make it work. A ghost user abandoning your onboarding because something else won is a finding, not a bug in the run.
- What do we get back?
Whether it finished, how long that took, and the wall — the single moment it lost the most ground. Then the trace: every step, timestamped, with the reasoning stated before the action rather than explained away afterwards.
The format every writeup carries →- What does it cost after the free one?
The first run is free and there is no card up front. Asking for payment before you have seen anything would be backwards.
After that we quote it rather than publish it. Tell us what you'd want run and how often, and a human comes back with what it would cost — no call to sit through first.
Ask what a run would cost →- Will you publish what you find?
Our own research runs, yes — publishing them is the point of them, and they go up whatever they find. A run you asked for is yours, and we don't publish it without asking you first.
When we do publish, we say what worked before we say what didn't, and we describe the moment rather than hand down a verdict. Nobody reads a teardown of their own product twice.
What we have published so far →
A run's numbers — how long it took, what it found — stay with the run that produced them, on the research page, rather than being summarised into an answer here.