Answered from how the product actually works.

Your card is charged for the plan you chose at sign-up and the subscription starts. The 14 days before that are a trial with a card on file: Stripe holds the payment method and issues the first invoice when the trial ends, so nothing is charged on day one and nothing is charged twice.

If you cancel before day 15, that charge never happens. Canceling is done from the billing page, which opens Stripe's customer portal.

Nothing else about the account changes on day 15. Your clients, quotes, jobs and photos are exactly where you left them. The one difference is the meter: the trial includes 50 AI actions, and from day 15 the allowance becomes your plan's monthly count — 300 on Operator, 1,500 on Command, 6,000 on Sovereign.

Open the billing page and choose Manage or cancel. That opens Stripe's customer portal, where canceling is one confirmation. There is no call to make, no form and no email to send.

Cancelling does not end access on the spot. You keep everything through the end of the period you already paid for, and the app shows the date. After that date the engines and paid features lock; you can still sign in to the billing page to pick a plan again.

Your data is not deleted when you cancel. Export any list as CSV while you still have access, or ask afterwards and we will send a full account export. If you want the account and its data removed, ask and we will delete it.

Every list in the app — quotes, invoices, jobs and clients — has an export that downloads a CSV of what you are looking at. CSV opens in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets and any accounting package, and it is the format your accountant will ask for.

There is no single "export everything" bundle yet. If you want the whole account in one go, ask and we will assemble it: the same CSVs, plus the sealed records with their hashes so they stay verifiable after they leave Ciolk. Photos you captured travel inside the analysis records they belong to rather than as a separate photo library, so they come with those records.

Export is not a feature of a particular plan. It is your data, and you can take it on Operator as easily as on Sovereign.

Not on subscription fees, with one exception. The 14-day trial exists so nobody pays for something they have not used, so once the day-15 charge has gone through we do not refund it or any later monthly or annual invoice. Canceling stops the next charge and keeps your access through the period you paid for.

The exception: if the first charge catches you out — you meant to cancel and forgot — write to us within 7 days of that first charge and we will refund it in full. That window applies to the first charge only, not to renewals or plan changes.

Overage charges for AI actions are billed as used and are not refunded. The full policy, including how to make a request, is at Refunds.

Annual plans are ten times the monthly price, charged once a year: $1,490 for Operator, $3,990 for Command, $9,990 for Sovereign. That is two months free against paying monthly — $124.17, $332.50 and $832.50 a month respectively — and Stripe charges the yearly figure, not the monthly equivalent.

The trial works the same way on annual: 14 days with a card on file, first charge on day 15. AI action allowances are still counted per calendar month, so an annual Command plan gives you 1,500 actions each month, not 18,000 to spend whenever. Actions beyond the allowance are billed at the plan's per-action rate.

Switching from monthly to annual part-way through a month is prorated by Stripe, so you are credited for the unused part of the month you already paid for.

Nothing stops. You are never cut off in the middle of a job because the meter ran out — the estimate still runs, the photos still analyze.

Actions beyond your monthly allowance are billed at your plan's per-action rate on the next invoice: $0.25 on Operator, $0.20 on Command, $0.15 on Sovereign. An Operator month with 340 actions adds $10 to the next bill. The usage meter on the billing page shows where you are against the allowance at any time, and the allowance resets each calendar month.

If you are regularly over, the next plan up is usually cheaper than paying overage. An extra 1,200 actions on Operator is $300 in overage; Command is $250 more a month and includes them, with a lower rate beyond that. Plan changes take effect immediately.

Yes, and it takes effect immediately. Change plan from the billing page and the new plan's engines and action allowance are available at once. Stripe prorates the difference, so you pay only for the days you are on each plan: a credit for the unused part of the old plan, a charge for the rest of the period on the new one.

Downgrades work the same way in reverse — the credit for the unused part of the higher plan applies against future invoices. If you have already used more actions this month than the lower plan includes, the difference bills at the lower plan's overage rate rather than locking anything.

Two limits to know about: healthcare, dental and medical practices cannot go below Command, and running more than one location needs Sovereign.

Because every AI action has a real cost behind it. When you capture a set of photos and get an estimate back, a model is reading those photos and writing that estimate, and we pay for that call whether or not you ever pay us. A free tier would mean either capping it so tightly that it cannot show you what the product does with a real job, or quietly recovering the cost from the people who do pay. We would rather give you 14 full days with your own work and 50 actions to run through it, charge nothing until day 15, and let you cancel from the billing page if it is not earning its place.

Because the parts of Ciolk a practice actually needs are Command features. Chain verification and packet export are not on Operator, and a practice that signed up for Operator would spend its first week discovering that and upgrading. Starting at Command means the plan you pick is the one that fits.

There is also the plain fact that a practice carries an inspection burden a one-person shop does not. Command is $399 a month, or $3,990 a year, with 1,500 AI actions and 15 seats. There is no onboarding fee while the product is operations-only.

The sign-up flow enforces this for healthcare, dental and medical, so it is not a choice you can make by mistake.

Yes, for the operation — and not for patients, yet. Ciolk runs a dental or medical practice's operations: treatment-plan pricing from your fee schedule, supplies, sealed sanitation and equipment checklists, team, and proof. It holds no patient records of any kind. Patient data, exam capture and recall are not available until our HIPAA program is live, and we will say so the day it is.

In practice that means a treatment-plan quote carries a reference like TP-0412 instead of a name, captures are of the operatory and supply invoices rather than of anyone's mouth, and a CLINICAL account is configured so patient information cannot be entered. The practice keeps the mapping from reference to patient in its own system of record.

There is no onboarding fee while the product is operations-only. Regulated practices still start at Command, because the proof surface — sealed records, chain verification, packet export — lives there.

One metered model call. Concretely: one photo analysis (a capture of up to six photos counts as one action, not six), one engine narrative run — a scenario plan, a claims appeal, a cash-position report — or one industry generation. Each of those sends work to a model, and each is one action against your monthly allowance.

Everything else stays off the meter: reading anything, writing a quote, sending an invoice, scheduling, generating a PDF, verifying a sealed record, importing clients, exporting CSV. You can run the whole day-to-day of the business without spending an action. Actions are only spent when the AI is actually doing work for you.

The billing page shows a live count against the allowance: 300 a month on Operator, 1,500 on Command, 6,000 on Sovereign, and 50 during the trial.

You change it. Every line of an estimate is editable before it becomes a quote — the AI's number is a starting point, and you are the one who knows your labor rate, your supplier and what that job actually takes. Nothing goes to a client without you.

Your correction is not thrown away. It is stored against the original prediction, and once five or more measured jobs exist for your business, estimates start calibrating to your shop rather than to a generic model. If the AI runs 12% high on paint every time, that shows up in the numbers and gets corrected. Differences inside about 10% are treated as noise so the calibration does not chase every rounding.

This is per business. Your corrections shape your estimates and nobody else's, and nobody else's shape yours.

No. The phone you already have is the capture device. Open Ciolk in the browser, point the camera at the job, take up to six photos, and the analysis runs from those. At a desk, the same app works in any modern browser for quoting, scheduling and invoicing.

There is no scanner, no tablet, no card reader and no terminal to buy. Client payments happen on the client's own phone or computer through a link, so you do not need to be holding anything when they pay.

If you want it to feel like an app, use Add to Home Screen on iPhone or Android and it installs as a standalone window with its own icon. That is a shortcut, not a separate download, and there is nothing to keep updated.

It needs a connection. There is no offline mode: photos are uploaded as you capture them, the analysis runs on a server, and quotes, schedule and client records are read live. On a site with no signal, the capture will not go through until you have signal again.

In practice a weak connection slows things down rather than losing anything — the upload waits for the network — but a dead zone means waiting until you are out of it. Taking photos with the phone's own camera app and uploading them once you are back in coverage works fine, and the analysis is the same.

We are saying this plainly because it is the honest answer, and because a bad-signal day is a real thing in this work. Offline capture is on the list; it is not there today.

Yes. A client never creates an account. When you send a quote or an invoice, they get a link. The link itself is the credential — a long, unguessable token, the same trust model as an emailed document — and opening it shows the quote or invoice with no sign-in.

Cards are handled by Stripe on Stripe's own payment form. Card numbers never touch Ciolk's servers; we see that a payment succeeded and for how much, and nothing else. Stripe is the same processor most of your clients have already paid through elsewhere.

A quote link lets the client accept the work by typing their name and pay the deposit if you asked for one. An invoice link lets them pay the balance. Either way, the payment shows against the job in your account as it happens.

A clean page with the work described in plain language line by line, the price of each line and the total, and — if you set one — the deposit due to book it. No app chrome, no sign-in, no Ciolk account to create. It is built to be read on a phone, because that is where it will be opened.

To accept, the client types their name and confirms. If there is a deposit, Stripe's payment form appears on the same page and they pay it there. You see the acceptance and the payment against the job straight away.

What they do not see: the AI analysis or the photos behind the numbers, your notes, or anything from any other client. The page shows what you would put on a printed quote, and there is a PDF of it if they want one.

Yes, and the edit becomes a new version rather than a rewrite of the old one. Every quote version is a fixed, immutable record. Editing a sent quote creates version two, marks version one as superseded, and sends the new one. The history is kept, so you can always see what the client was originally shown and what changed.

The link you already sent keeps working and always shows the newest sent version. Your client does not need a new link, and there is no way for them to accept or pay a superseded price — once a newer version is sent, the old one is unreachable through the link.

That immutability is deliberate. It means a quote is evidence of what was offered and when, which matters when a job goes sideways months later.

The schedule runs on a 15-minute grid with day and week views. Appointments attach to a job and a client, so opening one takes you to the record with the quote, the photos and the balance rather than to a bare calendar entry. Appointment status moves through legal steps only — the buttons offer the next state that makes sense, not every state.

Double-bookings are allowed and shown in red. That is a deliberate choice: in a real shop, two things in the same slot is sometimes exactly what you meant — two techs, a drop-off overlapping a pickup — and being blocked from saving is worse than being shown the overlap. The red is the warning; you decide.

Employees see the schedule too. It is one of the pinned items in the daily spine alongside Today, Capture, Quotes, Jobs, Invoices and Clients.

On Sovereign, yes. Operator and Command are one location each. Sovereign is built for operators running several, with unlimited seats and 6,000 AI actions a month across them, at $999 a month or $9,990 a year.

Practically, a location is a place with its own schedule and its own staff. If you have one workshop and do site visits, that is one location, and Operator or Command covers it. If you have two shops with two front desks and two calendars, that is two locations, and the plan that fits is Sovereign.

Sovereign also comes with a custom industry profile shaped to your operation and a direct line to the founder plus guided onboarding, because a multi-location setup is where the configuration is worth doing carefully with someone.

There are two roles. An owner sees everything, including billing, plans and usage. An employee sees the daily spine — Today, Schedule, Capture, Jobs, Clients — and the operational groups, and never sees billing, pricing or the subscription. Employees sign up through a link you send them and land in the app already scoped to your business.

Seats are the whole team the plan includes, you counted: 3 on Operator, 15 on Command, unlimited on Sovereign. The cap is soft and applies only at the door: when the seats are taken, the next person who enters your invite code is told so and asked to have you move up a plan, and the code works again the moment you do. Nobody already in is ever locked out, and the trial is not capped.

That is a deliberate choice. Plans are priced on AI actions rather than seats because charging you for hiring is charging you for growth, and that is the wrong thing to tax.

You do. The photos you capture, the estimates, the quotes, the client records, the corrections you make — all of it is yours. Ciolk holds it to run the product for you and for nothing else.

That has practical consequences. Export any list as CSV whenever you like, from any plan. Ask for a full account export and you get everything. Ask for deletion and the account and its data are removed. None of that needs a reason, and none of it is gated behind a support tier.

We do not sell it, share it with other customers, or use it to train models. The calibration that happens from your corrections applies only to your own business's estimates. The full statement of what is stored, where and under what terms is on the security page.

Every result an engine produces — an estimate from photos, a claims appeal, a cash report — is sealed the moment it is created. Sealing hashes the exact content with SHA-256 and stores that hash alongside the record. Change one character of the record afterwards and the hash no longer matches, so the record shows as altered.

Once a day, every hash from that day is combined into a Merkle root, and that root is chained to the previous day's. Each day's seal therefore depends on every day before it, which means nobody can quietly rewrite last month without breaking every seal since.

The point is that the record proves itself. A payer, an insurer, an auditor or a client holding the hash can confirm the record existed at that time and has not changed — without taking our word for it, and without seeing the contents.

Go to Verify, paste the hash, and press the button. No account and no sign-in — the page is deliberately outside the app so that anyone you hand a hash to can use it, including people who have no reason to trust Ciolk.

The result is one of three states, and it is never collapsed to a simple yes. Valid means the record exists and its stored content still produces the same hash. Altered means it exists but the content has changed since sealing. Legacy-unverifiable means the record predates a fix to how hashes are computed and cannot be fully attested; we show that honestly rather than passing it.

The page tells you whether the record is intact and when it was sealed, never what is in it. Contents stay private; only integrity is public.

In a Postgres database hosted by Supabase in the United States, with the application running on Vercel. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS between your browser, Vercel and the database, and encrypted at rest by the database provider. Photos you capture go to the analysis in the request and are kept inside the resulting record rather than as a separate file store.

Payments are held by Stripe. Card data never reaches our servers, because Stripe's own hosted forms collect it.

Model calls go to Anthropic's API under commercial terms, which do not permit training on the inputs. The exact list of providers, what each one holds, and the current status of every certification or agreement is kept on the security page — including the ones we do not yet have.

No. Your photos, estimates, client records and corrections are never used to train a model — not ours, not anyone's.

Two things happen that might sound like training and are not. First, the AI provider: model calls go to Anthropic's API under commercial terms, which do not use inputs for training. Second, calibration: when you correct an estimate, that correction is stored for your business and, once five or more measured jobs exist, used to adjust your future estimates. That is arithmetic on your own history, applied only to you. Another shop's corrections never touch your numbers, and yours never touch theirs.

So the AI does get better at pricing your work over time, but only from your work, and only for you.

Not today, and no. Ciolk is not HIPAA compliant and does not offer a Business Associate Agreement. A dental or medical account runs practice operations — pricing, supplies, checklists, team, proof — and is configured so that patient information cannot be entered: no patient records, exam images or recall until our HIPAA program is live.

The program is written down, with its status, on the security page: subprocessor agreements, an isolated database, MFA and session limits, a read-access audit log, then a BAA for customers. Nothing is bought or claimed until each step is real.

We are stating this plainly because a practice can be harmed by a vague answer here.

Today it sits beside it. There are no direct integrations with Dentrix, Open Dental, CCC, Mitchell or any other practice or shop system — nothing in the product talks to them. What exists is CSV in and CSV out: import your client list from whatever export your current system produces, and export quotes, invoices, jobs and clients from Ciolk as CSV any time.

For most operators that is enough to start, because the work Ciolk does — photo estimates, quotes clients accept by link, sealed records, calibration from your corrections — is the part the existing system does not do. You keep your system of record for what it is good at and let Ciolk run the parts it is bad at.

Direct integrations are built on request. If yours is the one you need, tell us which system and what you want to move between them.

Yes. Operator is built for exactly that: an owner-operator running the day themselves. It has capture, quotes, jobs, scheduling, invoices and clients — the whole daily spine — plus the operations and finance groups, 300 AI actions a month, 3 seats and one location, at $149 a month or $1,490 a year.

300 actions is roughly ten photo analyses every day of the month. A one-person shop quoting a handful of jobs a day will not get near it; if you do, overage is $0.25 an action and never cuts you off.

What Operator does not include is the full engine set — insurance recovery, scenario planning, compliance packet export. If you find yourself wanting those, moving to Command is immediate and prorated. Start on Operator; it is the plan meant for you.

Sovereign. Command would cover 12 people — it includes 15 seats — but it is a one-location plan, and the second location is what decides it. Sovereign is the plan for multiple locations, with unlimited seats and 6,000 AI actions a month across them, at $999 a month or $9,990 a year.

At that size the action allowance matters too. Twelve people capturing across two sites will use more than Command's 1,500 in a busy month, and Sovereign's per-action overage is the lowest of the three at $0.15 if you go past 6,000.

Sovereign also comes with a custom industry profile built for your operation, a direct line to the founder and guided onboarding. For a two-site business that is the part worth having: the configuration gets done with someone rather than worked out alone.