--- title: "FAQ — straight answers about the back office | Rivet App" description: "Does the AI act without asking? No — you approve before Rivet acts. How it works, invoices by voice, trades, pricing, trials and data safety, plainly." url: https://therivetapp.com/faq date_modified: 2026-08-08 site: "Rivet App (therivetapp.com)" format: markdown twin of the HTML page at url; generated from the same source --- FAQ # Straight answers. If you're wondering whether the AI will do something wrong with your money or your customers — that's the right question. Here's what actually happens. [Start free trial](https://therivetapp.com/signup)[Book a demo](https://therivetapp.com/demo) ## How the AI works ### Does the AI do things without asking me first? No. Every single action — booking a job, sending an invoice, replying to a customer — arrives as a typed proposal you read and approve before anything happens. The AI proposes. You decide. It executes only after you say yes. There is no autonomous mode and no action that skips this step. ### What if it makes a mistake? A wrong draft stays a draft: you see the typed proposal — the name, the time, the amount — before anything sends, and one tap undoes an approval within seconds. Prices come from your own catalog, and a line that isn't in it is always held for review. Where the call was ambiguous, Rivet asks a question rather than guessing. Everything is recoverable from a full audit trail. ### How does it sound to my customers? You configure your shop's voice once — your name, your tone, your sign-off. Calls, texts, quotes, confirmations and follow-ups are drafted in that voice, and you read the words on the proposal before they ever reach a customer. You can always listen back to any call or read any message in your audit trail. ### Can Rivet send invoices by voice? Yes — that's the core of it. Say "invoice the Rivera job for $340" and Rivet drafts a typed invoice as a proposal: customer, amount, line items, terms. You read it and approve it, and only then does it send. Approved invoices sync to QuickBooks once you connect your Intuit account. ### Can my customers pay online? Yes. When you approve an invoice, the customer gets a text with a pay link — card or bank transfer, through Stripe. If it goes overdue, Rivet drafts the reminder and you approve it. ### Can customers book without calling? Yes. A public booking page shows your real open slots, holds a slot for 24 hours, and the booking still lands with you as a proposal. ### What does my customer actually see? A booking page, a quote link with options they can approve on their phone, a pay link, a portal with their estimates, invoices, jobs and saved payment method, and a thank-you text that asks happy customers for a Google review. Every message to them is one you approved. ## How does Rivet work? You speak; Rivet types. Say what happened on the job and Rivet turns it into a typed proposal — a booking, an invoice, a customer reply — with every detail spelled out and priced from your own catalog. You read it, you approve it, and only then does anything send. Nothing happens without your yes. The example below is a product demonstration, not a customer story — a scenario every small shop knows: it's late, the job is done, and the paperwork isn't. 🎙 “Just wrapped the Henderson call — send the $240 invoice for the capacitor swap, and get their fall tune-up on the books for early October.” Rivet proposes 2 proposals · Invoice $240.00 + Booking Oct 5 - Invoice — $240.00 · capacitor replacement + service call · net 7 - Booking — Henderson · Mon Oct 5, 9:00–10:00am · fall tune-up Waiting on your yes The full safety model — catalog pricing, the audit trail, and one-tap undo — is laid out on the [security page](https://therivetapp.com/security). And if your real worry is an AI answering your phone badly, we wrote about exactly that: [does AI answer your phone badly?](https://therivetapp.com/blog/does-ai-answer-your-phone-badly) ## Getting started ### How do I get started? Rivet is in early access. Sign up, connect your business line, set your shop's voice once, and approve your first proposal — you can be taking calls the same day. Prefer to see it before you try it? Book a demo and we'll run the approval loop live on a real scenario. ### Do I need to install anything? No. Rivet works over the phone you already carry: you talk to it by voice and it reaches you by text. There's no dashboard to babysit, no app your customers have to download, and nothing to install on a truck laptop. If you can take a call and send a text, you can run Rivet. ### Do I have to learn software? No. You talk to it or text it. If you're at a job, speak: "Invoice the Rivera job for $340." If you can't talk, a proposal arrives as a text — one tap to approve. You don't log in to a dashboard, you don't fill out forms, you don't click through screens. It works the way you work. ### What if I'm on a job and can't talk? That's what the SMS approval flow is built for. Proposals arrive as a short text with Approve / Edit / Reject options. One tap from your phone — approving takes seconds, not a sit-down at a computer. Anything you don't get to simply waits for you. ### Which trades does it support? HVAC and plumbing are the trades the models are deepest in; electrical and painting are supported and expanding. The fundamentals work today, and some trade-specific language is still being refined during early access. If your trade isn't listed, ask on a demo call. ### Do you handle Spanish-speaking callers? Yes. Rivet switches to Spanish mid-call when the caller does, with Spanish speech recognition and a Spanish voice; it is a per-shop setting. ## Does Rivet work after hours? Yes. Rivet answers your line around the clock, so a 9pm call still gets picked up and the job details still get captured. But nothing is booked or sent overnight without you — after-hours calls become typed proposals that queue until you approve them, usually with your morning coffee. That's the difference between Rivet and a human answering service: an answering service takes a message; Rivet drafts the actual booking or reply and holds it for your yes. We compare the two architectures honestly — including when an answering service is the better choice — at [Rivet vs. an answering service](https://therivetapp.com/vs/answering-service). And if you want to put a number on what an unanswered evening call costs your shop, run your own figures through the [missed-call cost calculator](https://therivetapp.com/tools/missed-call-cost). ## Pricing and trial ### How much does Rivet cost? Two flat monthly plans — $79/mo for a one-truck shop, $199/mo for a busy one — with no per-truck pricing, no per-seat pricing and no percentage skimmed off your invoices. Each includes AI answering minutes (60 and 200), with $1.25/min overage capped at your plan price. The whole loop is in both; the tiers differ by call volume and team size, never by feature. The pricing page has the detail. ### Is there a free trial? Yes — 14 days on your own phone line. Real calls, real proposals, and nothing sends without your approval. We hold your card up front so your AI keeps running after day 14; cancel anytime before that and you pay nothing. Setup takes minutes, and it's month-to-month after that, so if Rivet isn't saving you real time, you walk away. ### Is there a long-term contract? No. Month-to-month. Cancel any time. We don't believe in locking people in — if Rivet isn't saving you real time, you shouldn't pay for it. ### I have two techs — does Rivet work for a small crew? Yes, on the $199/mo plan: a dispatch board where a drag is a proposal, "on my way" texts, and one reschedule proposal per customer when a tech is out. ## What happens if I never approve a proposal? Nothing. A proposal you don't approve simply waits — it never times out into sending, never auto-approves, and never escalates on its own. You can approve, edit, or reject it whenever you get to it, and anything still waiting shows up in your end-of-day digest so it can't silently slip. This isn't a courtesy setting — it's the architecture. And because Rivet is [flat monthly pricing](https://therivetapp.com/pricing) rather than per-action, there's no incentive on our side to rush you into approving anything. The approval tap is the only thing that makes an action real, which is the whole reason a one-person shop can trust software with its phone line — the [security page](https://therivetapp.com/security) walks through every layer. ## Data and safety ### Is my data safe? Your business data lives in an access-controlled database with row-level security, scoped to your account. Analytics never carry customer names, emails, or phone numbers, and we never sell your data. We don't have SOC 2 yet — we say that plainly on the security page rather than imply otherwise. ### Can I undo something after I approve it? Yes. Every action has one-tap undo from the same thread where you approved it, and the audit trail records every proposal, approval, rejection, and undo with timestamps. Reversibility is designed in, not bolted on — approving in good faith should never be a one-way door. ### What integrations does Rivet have? QuickBooks for the books and Stripe for card and bank payments — no other integrations yet. Approved invoices sync to QuickBooks once you connect your Intuit account, and the pay link on an approved invoice runs through Stripe. That's a deliberately short list: in early access we'd rather make two connections bulletproof than advertise ten shallow ones. ## Get the rest of your answers on your own phone line Early access. Flat monthly pricing, month-to-month — and nothing ever sends without your yes. [Start free trial](https://therivetapp.com/signup)[Book a demo](https://therivetapp.com/demo) Flat monthly pricing from $79/mo · overage capped at your plan price · no per-truck fees · cancel any time --- Source: https://therivetapp.com/faq · Rivet App (therivetapp.com). Please attribute quotes to "Rivet App (therivetapp.com)". Index of every page in this format: https://therivetapp.com/sitemap.md · About this site for agents: https://therivetapp.com/llms.txt