Help & FAQ

Common questions about Forum Atlas. Can't find what you need? support@forumatlas.com.

Getting started

How do I sign up?: Go to forumatlas.com/signup and choose your auth method (Google, Microsoft, GitHub, or email-password). You'll be guided through a 90-second onboarding: pick your primary sector, secondary sectors (Pro+), persona, brief delivery time + timezone. Your first brief lands the next morning at your chosen time.
Which sector should I pick first?: Pick the sector you read about every day. If you're a defense-tech VC, Defense. CISO at a Fortune 500, Cyber. Pharma analyst, Health. You can change primary sector anytime in Settings. Pro+ tier lets you add up to 2 secondary sectors for cross-sector entity context.
What's a persona and how do I pick one?: Each sector ships with 6 personas — different roles within the industry that need different brief content. ForumDefense personas include defense-tech VC, prime corp-strat, defense PE, regulatory counsel, journalist/analyst, and defense-tech founder. Each persona's brief weights different sources + sections (the VC brief leads with funding events; the prime brief leads with M&A activity). Pick the one closest to your role — you can change persona anytime.
When does my brief arrive?: Your brief is generated overnight (5am UTC = 12am ET = 9pm PT) and delivered at the time you selected during onboarding, in your timezone. You can change delivery time anytime in Settings. If you set delivery to 6am ET, the brief is generated 3 hours before delivery to ensure fresh content.

Forum Brief

What's actually in a Forum Brief?: A daily synthesis of what happened in your sector(s), tuned to your persona, with every claim verbatim-matched to a primary source. Typical brief structure: 5–7 sections covering today's funding signal, corp-dev activity, regulatory horizon, conflict/capability signal, etc. Each section has 1–3 paragraphs; every analytical claim carries a citation, and typical briefs carry 3–10.
How is Forum Brief different from a Google Alert or newsletter?: Three differences. (1) Synthesis, not aggregation — Forum Atlas reads the source catalog for you, deduplicates, identifies what's material, and writes a coherent narrative. (2) Citation discipline — every claim is verbatim-matched to a source chunk by our Citation Validator agent; if a match fails, we fall back to "insufficient evidence" rather than fabricate. (3) Persona-tuned — your brief differs from another customer's brief in the same sector because each is built for a different role's daily decision rhythm.
What if Forum Atlas can't find a verbatim match for a claim?: Our Citation Validator rejects the claim. The brief falls back to "insufficient evidence" rather than fabricate. This is non-negotiable design discipline — when our retrieval pipeline can't ground a claim in a primary source, we'd rather omit it than hallucinate. You'll see this in the validator stat at the bottom of each brief: "8/8 claims verbatim-matched" or "7/8 claims matched, 1 omitted as insufficient evidence."
Can I download or share a brief?: Yes. Each brief has a "Cite this paragraph" button (copies bibliography-formatted citation) plus export options: PDF (Pro), Word/PPT/Excel (Team+), email-this (all tiers), and API export (Enterprise B2A2B). Shareable URL with workspace-aware read-only access is on the roadmap.
How do I customize what's in my brief?: Two controls today: (1) Persona (weights which sections + sources dominate), (2) Watchlist (entities, programs, regulators you want emphasized — top 25 entities at Pro, 200 at Team+). A third — saved searches, standing queries that re-run nightly and surface deltas in your next brief — is coming soon and not yet live.

Forum Forecast

What's Forum Forecast?: Monte-Carlo probability distributions on questions like "Will Lockheed acquire Anduril before EOY 2027?" or "What's the probability the PJM 2027/28 BRA clears at the cap?" Returns a probability distribution with confidence intervals + driver attribution (which sources moved the probability most) + revision history (how the probability shifted over time as new information landed).
Why probability distributions instead of point estimates?: Because point estimates compress out the uncertainty that matters. "There's a 38% probability of X with CI 25–51%" tells you more than "X is unlikely." For decision-making, the distribution shape (tight vs wide) IS the signal. Plus our revision history lets you scrub time and see exactly which sources moved the probability, when, and why.
How accurate are Forum Forecasts?: We commit to publishing accuracy metrics quarterly starting Q3 2027 — six months of predicted-vs-actual data. Until then: our forecasts are calibrated by design (the forecast coordinator uses Anthropic Claude with explicit confidence labels + refusal-on-uncertainty defaults). If we don't have enough evidence to forecast, we don't force a probability.
Which tier has Forum Forecast?: Team ($199/mo, 5 seats) and above. Pro tier sees probability headlines; full distribution + driver attribution + revision history is Team+. Enterprise (from $1,500/mo) adds custom forecast subscriptions + webhook alerts on probability shifts >5%.

Forum Network

What's Forum Network?: The cross-sector entity graph. Search any entity (companies, regulators, programs, people) and see its full profile: identifier panel (Wikidata QID + GLEIF LEI + SEC CIK + aliases), sectors_tagged (every Forum Atlas sector the entity appears in), relationships graph (force-directed; toggle by relationship type), recent news + briefs + forecasts citing the entity, ownership chain (parent + ultimate-parent + subsidiaries), M&A history.
How is the entity graph built?: Bootstrap from Wikidata + OpenCorporates + GLEIF LEI + OFAC SDN + SEC company tickers + USPTO assignee normalization. Augmented continuously by an AI Resolution Agent that handles alias resolution (e.g., "Lockheed Martin Corporation" = "Lockheed" = "LMT" = "Lockmart"), subsidiary linking (Sikorsky → Lockheed Martin), M&A history (Maxar → Maxar Technologies → Advent take-private 2023), and cross-sector tagging.
Can I query the entity graph programmatically?: Yes — entity search and entity data are available through the B2A2B API. See /docs/api-reference for the live endpoint list and request shapes.

Pricing & Billing

What do the tiers include?: Free ($0): Forum Brief top-3 items daily, 30-day archive, 50 queries/mo, 1 entity profile/day.
Pro ($39/mo): Full Forum Brief, unlimited queries, full archive, Forum Network basic, PDF export.
Team ($199/mo, 5 seats): + Forum Forecast, full Forum Network, Word/PPT/Excel export.
Business ($600/mo, 15 seats): everything in Team + SSO (SAML/OIDC), full API access with uncapped reads, DPA + 1-year audit log.
Enterprise (from $1,500/mo, 25 seats): + dedicated CSM, customer-data ingestion (private workspace), per-customer-fine-tuned model layer.
B2A2B API: ~$0.01 per fast (speculative) cited query, ~$0.10 per deliberate synthesis query; custom volume rates for Enterprise.
Saved searches + alerts are on the near-term roadmap for every paid tier (marked "coming soon" on /pricing) — not live yet.
Is there a Government tier?: No. Forum Atlas is commercial industry intelligence. Federal procurement intelligence is a separate product (ForumGov) that spun out 2026-05-04 and is not affiliated with Forum Atlas commercially. Contact ForumGov separately if that's your need.
How is the B2A2B API priced?: Per-query metered, not per-seat: ~$0.01 per fast (speculative) cited query and ~$0.10 per deliberate synthesis query (simple catalog reads meter at $0.001 — full table at API pricing & metering; same numbers as /pricing). Custom Enterprise volume rates available — contact sales@forumatlas.com.
What payment methods do you accept?: Self-serve card checkout (Stripe) is rolling out now. Until it's live, upgrades are arranged directly — contact sales@forumatlas.com and we'll set you up the same day. Enterprise: invoiced annually (NET 30) via Stripe or wire transfer; ACH on request.
Can I cancel anytime?: Yes. The free tier requires no cancellation. Pro + Team subscriptions can be cancelled anytime by emailing support@forumatlas.com (in-app cancellation lands with self-serve billing); access continues through the paid period. Enterprise: per your annual contract terms.
Do you offer refunds?: Pro + Team: 14-day no-questions-asked refund on your first payment — email support@forumatlas.com. Subsequent payments are non-refundable but you keep access through the paid period. Enterprise: per contract terms.

API & Integrations

How do I get an API key?: API keys in the app → Generate. Every plan can generate keys; endpoint availability and monthly caps vary by tier — uncapped access starts at Business (see /pricing and tier gates). Each key carries explicit scopes and a per-key rate limit.
Which SDKs do you have?: A TypeScript SDK. For every other language, raw fetch/HTTP against the REST API works fine — see /docs/api-reference.
Are there rate limits?: Yes. Every API key carries a per-key requests-per-second limit, set when the key is created (visible on the API keys page). Requests over the limit receive 429 responses — back off and retry.
Do you support webhooks?: Not yet — webhook delivery (brief-ready, forecast-revised, anomaly-detected) is on the near-term roadmap and will be configurable per-workspace under Integrations when it ships. Until then, poll the API or use in-app/email delivery.

Data, Privacy & Compliance

Where is my data stored?: US-East (us-east-1) primary on Supabase; us-west-2 backup. All workspace data is row-level-security-isolated per workspace_id. Enterprise customers can request EU residency under custom contract. For Enterprise customer-data ingestion (private corpus), each customer's data lives in a per-customer schema namespace (customer_<id>) with separate encryption keys + RLS — fully isolated from shared forum.* storage and from other customers.
Is Forum Atlas SOC 2 certified?: SOC 2 Type II is planned (target Q3 2027). Until certification, we operate under SOC 2-equivalent self-attestation plus NIST 800-53 self-mapping. Documentation available under NDA for Enterprise prospects via the enterprise contact form.
What about HIPAA / PHI?: ForumHealth ingests zero PHI/PII — only public, citation-grade healthcare industry intelligence (FDA approvals, CMS coverage decisions, public-co IR, academic journals). HIPAA does not apply because no protected health information enters our pipeline. If your use case requires PHI handling, ForumHealth is not the right product.
What about ITAR / Export Controls?: ForumDefense covers commercial defense industry only (M&A, capital, technical-press, public regulatory filings) — no classified or ITAR-controlled content. Some sources have export-control flags (jurisdiction_flags: export_control_risk) — these are surfaced with cite-only treatment and licensing tags. Federal procurement intelligence (which is a different scope) lives in the separate ForumGov product.
Can I delete my workspace data?: Yes. Email justin@forumatlas.com (or support@forumatlas.com) from your account email and request workspace deletion — we honor GDPR/right-to-erasure requests and delete all customer-scoped data (users, delivered briefs, watchlists, API keys, billing records), with a 30-day soft-delete grace period before permanent purge. A self-serve Delete Workspace control in Settings is planned. The public-data corpus (sources, documents, entities) is unaffected since it's not customer-specific.

Support

How do I get help?: Email support@forumatlas.com for product questions, bug reports, feedback. Email justin@forumatlas.com for a direct founder line while we're early. Enterprise: dedicated CSM via Slack-connect or shared inbox.
What's your response SLA?: Free + Pro + Team: best-effort within 24 business hours. Enterprise: 4-hour SLA on business days; 8-hour SLA off-hours; uptime SLA per contract.
Where can I report a citation error or factual issue?: Click "Flag this claim" on any brief paragraph — opens a flag-review queue in our Community surface. Verified errors earn a bounty (rates at /docs/bounties). Or email support@forumatlas.com.
Where can I see what's coming next?: /docs/roadmap + /docs/changelog. The roadmap is built from customer signal — tell us what you want at roadmap@forumatlas.com.

Getting started

How do I sign up?

Go to forumatlas.com/signup and choose your auth method (Google, Microsoft, GitHub, or email-password). You'll be guided through a 90-second onboarding: pick your primary sector, secondary sectors (Pro+), persona, brief delivery time + timezone. Your first brief lands the next morning at your chosen time.

Which sector should I pick first?

Pick the sector you read about every day. If you're a defense-tech VC, Defense. CISO at a Fortune 500, Cyber. Pharma analyst, Health. You can change primary sector anytime in Settings. Pro+ tier lets you add up to 2 secondary sectors for cross-sector entity context.

What's a persona and how do I pick one?

Each sector ships with 6 personas — different roles within the industry that need different brief content. ForumDefense personas include defense-tech VC, prime corp-strat, defense PE, regulatory counsel, journalist/analyst, and defense-tech founder. Each persona's brief weights different sources + sections (the VC brief leads with funding events; the prime brief leads with M&A activity). Pick the one closest to your role — you can change persona anytime.

When does my brief arrive?

Your brief is generated overnight (5am UTC = 12am ET = 9pm PT) and delivered at the time you selected during onboarding, in your timezone. You can change delivery time anytime in Settings. If you set delivery to 6am ET, the brief is generated 3 hours before delivery to ensure fresh content.

Forum Brief

What's actually in a Forum Brief?

A daily synthesis of what happened in your sector(s), tuned to your persona, with every claim verbatim-matched to a primary source. Typical brief structure: 5–7 sections covering today's funding signal, corp-dev activity, regulatory horizon, conflict/capability signal, etc. Each section has 1–3 paragraphs; every analytical claim carries a citation, and typical briefs carry 3–10.

How is Forum Brief different from a Google Alert or newsletter?

Three differences. (1) Synthesis, not aggregation — Forum Atlas reads the source catalog for you, deduplicates, identifies what's material, and writes a coherent narrative. (2) Citation discipline — every claim is verbatim-matched to a source chunk by our Citation Validator agent; if a match fails, we fall back to "insufficient evidence" rather than fabricate. (3) Persona-tuned — your brief differs from another customer's brief in the same sector because each is built for a different role's daily decision rhythm.

What if Forum Atlas can't find a verbatim match for a claim?

Our Citation Validator rejects the claim. The brief falls back to "insufficient evidence" rather than fabricate. This is non-negotiable design discipline — when our retrieval pipeline can't ground a claim in a primary source, we'd rather omit it than hallucinate. You'll see this in the validator stat at the bottom of each brief: "8/8 claims verbatim-matched" or "7/8 claims matched, 1 omitted as insufficient evidence."

Can I download or share a brief?

Yes. Each brief has a "Cite this paragraph" button (copies bibliography-formatted citation) plus export options: PDF (Pro), Word/PPT/Excel (Team+), email-this (all tiers), and API export (Enterprise B2A2B). Shareable URL with workspace-aware read-only access is on the roadmap.

How do I customize what's in my brief?

Two controls today: (1) Persona (weights which sections + sources dominate), (2) Watchlist (entities, programs, regulators you want emphasized — top 25 entities at Pro, 200 at Team+). A third — saved searches, standing queries that re-run nightly and surface deltas in your next brief — is coming soon and not yet live.

Forum Forecast

What's Forum Forecast?

Monte-Carlo probability distributions on questions like "Will Lockheed acquire Anduril before EOY 2027?" or "What's the probability the PJM 2027/28 BRA clears at the cap?" Returns a probability distribution with confidence intervals + driver attribution (which sources moved the probability most) + revision history (how the probability shifted over time as new information landed).

Why probability distributions instead of point estimates?

Because point estimates compress out the uncertainty that matters. "There's a 38% probability of X with CI 25–51%" tells you more than "X is unlikely." For decision-making, the distribution shape (tight vs wide) IS the signal. Plus our revision history lets you scrub time and see exactly which sources moved the probability, when, and why.

How accurate are Forum Forecasts?

We commit to publishing accuracy metrics quarterly starting Q3 2027 — six months of predicted-vs-actual data. Until then: our forecasts are calibrated by design (the forecast coordinator uses Anthropic Claude with explicit confidence labels + refusal-on-uncertainty defaults). If we don't have enough evidence to forecast, we don't force a probability.

Which tier has Forum Forecast?

Team ($199/mo, 5 seats) and above. Pro tier sees probability headlines; full distribution + driver attribution + revision history is Team+. Enterprise (from $1,500/mo) adds custom forecast subscriptions + webhook alerts on probability shifts >5%.

Forum Network

What's Forum Network?

The cross-sector entity graph. Search any entity (companies, regulators, programs, people) and see its full profile: identifier panel (Wikidata QID + GLEIF LEI + SEC CIK + aliases), sectors_tagged (every Forum Atlas sector the entity appears in), relationships graph (force-directed; toggle by relationship type), recent news + briefs + forecasts citing the entity, ownership chain (parent + ultimate-parent + subsidiaries), M&A history.

How is the entity graph built?

Bootstrap from Wikidata + OpenCorporates + GLEIF LEI + OFAC SDN + SEC company tickers + USPTO assignee normalization. Augmented continuously by an AI Resolution Agent that handles alias resolution (e.g., "Lockheed Martin Corporation" = "Lockheed" = "LMT" = "Lockmart"), subsidiary linking (Sikorsky → Lockheed Martin), M&A history (Maxar → Maxar Technologies → Advent take-private 2023), and cross-sector tagging.

Can I query the entity graph programmatically?

Yes — entity search and entity data are available through the B2A2B API. See /docs/api-reference for the live endpoint list and request shapes.

Pricing & Billing

What do the tiers include?

Free ($0): Forum Brief top-3 items daily, 30-day archive, 50 queries/mo, 1 entity profile/day.
Pro ($39/mo): Full Forum Brief, unlimited queries, full archive, Forum Network basic, PDF export.
Team ($199/mo, 5 seats): + Forum Forecast, full Forum Network, Word/PPT/Excel export.
Business ($600/mo, 15 seats): everything in Team + SSO (SAML/OIDC), full API access with uncapped reads, DPA + 1-year audit log.
Enterprise (from $1,500/mo, 25 seats): + dedicated CSM, customer-data ingestion (private workspace), per-customer-fine-tuned model layer.
B2A2B API: ~$0.01 per fast (speculative) cited query, ~$0.10 per deliberate synthesis query; custom volume rates for Enterprise.
Saved searches + alerts are on the near-term roadmap for every paid tier (marked "coming soon" on /pricing) — not live yet.

Is there a Government tier?

No. Forum Atlas is commercial industry intelligence. Federal procurement intelligence is a separate product (ForumGov) that spun out 2026-05-04 and is not affiliated with Forum Atlas commercially. Contact ForumGov separately if that's your need.

How is the B2A2B API priced?

Per-query metered, not per-seat: ~$0.01 per fast (speculative) cited query and ~$0.10 per deliberate synthesis query (simple catalog reads meter at $0.001 — full table at API pricing & metering; same numbers as /pricing). Custom Enterprise volume rates available — contact sales@forumatlas.com.

What payment methods do you accept?

Self-serve card checkout (Stripe) is rolling out now. Until it's live, upgrades are arranged directly — contact sales@forumatlas.com and we'll set you up the same day. Enterprise: invoiced annually (NET 30) via Stripe or wire transfer; ACH on request.

Can I cancel anytime?

Yes. The free tier requires no cancellation. Pro + Team subscriptions can be cancelled anytime by emailing support@forumatlas.com (in-app cancellation lands with self-serve billing); access continues through the paid period. Enterprise: per your annual contract terms.

Do you offer refunds?

Pro + Team: 14-day no-questions-asked refund on your first payment — email support@forumatlas.com. Subsequent payments are non-refundable but you keep access through the paid period. Enterprise: per contract terms.

API & Integrations

How do I get an API key?

API keys in the app → Generate. Every plan can generate keys; endpoint availability and monthly caps vary by tier — uncapped access starts at Business (see /pricing and tier gates). Each key carries explicit scopes and a per-key rate limit.

Which SDKs do you have?

A TypeScript SDK. For every other language, raw fetch/HTTP against the REST API works fine — see /docs/api-reference.

Are there rate limits?

Yes. Every API key carries a per-key requests-per-second limit, set when the key is created (visible on the API keys page). Requests over the limit receive 429 responses — back off and retry.

Do you support webhooks?

Not yet — webhook delivery (brief-ready, forecast-revised, anomaly-detected) is on the near-term roadmap and will be configurable per-workspace under Integrations when it ships. Until then, poll the API or use in-app/email delivery.

Data, Privacy & Compliance

Where is my data stored?

US-East (us-east-1) primary on Supabase; us-west-2 backup. All workspace data is row-level-security-isolated per workspace_id. Enterprise customers can request EU residency under custom contract. For Enterprise customer-data ingestion (private corpus), each customer's data lives in a per-customer schema namespace (customer_<id>) with separate encryption keys + RLS — fully isolated from shared forum.* storage and from other customers.

Is Forum Atlas SOC 2 certified?

SOC 2 Type II is planned (target Q3 2027). Until certification, we operate under SOC 2-equivalent self-attestation plus NIST 800-53 self-mapping. Documentation available under NDA for Enterprise prospects via the enterprise contact form.

What about HIPAA / PHI?

ForumHealth ingests zero PHI/PII — only public, citation-grade healthcare industry intelligence (FDA approvals, CMS coverage decisions, public-co IR, academic journals). HIPAA does not apply because no protected health information enters our pipeline. If your use case requires PHI handling, ForumHealth is not the right product.

What about ITAR / Export Controls?

ForumDefense covers commercial defense industry only (M&A, capital, technical-press, public regulatory filings) — no classified or ITAR-controlled content. Some sources have export-control flags (jurisdiction_flags: export_control_risk) — these are surfaced with cite-only treatment and licensing tags. Federal procurement intelligence (which is a different scope) lives in the separate ForumGov product.

Can I delete my workspace data?

Yes. Email justin@forumatlas.com (or support@forumatlas.com) from your account email and request workspace deletion — we honor GDPR/right-to-erasure requests and delete all customer-scoped data (users, delivered briefs, watchlists, API keys, billing records), with a 30-day soft-delete grace period before permanent purge. A self-serve Delete Workspace control in Settings is planned. The public-data corpus (sources, documents, entities) is unaffected since it's not customer-specific.

Support

How do I get help?

Email support@forumatlas.com for product questions, bug reports, feedback. Email justin@forumatlas.com for a direct founder line while we're early. Enterprise: dedicated CSM via Slack-connect or shared inbox.

What's your response SLA?

Free + Pro + Team: best-effort within 24 business hours. Enterprise: 4-hour SLA on business days; 8-hour SLA off-hours; uptime SLA per contract.

Where can I report a citation error or factual issue?

Click "Flag this claim" on any brief paragraph — opens a flag-review queue in our Community surface. Verified errors earn a bounty (rates at /docs/bounties). Or email support@forumatlas.com.

Where can I see what's coming next?

/docs/roadmap + /docs/changelog. The roadmap is built from customer signal — tell us what you want at roadmap@forumatlas.com.