Questions

Frequently asked questions

The questions we actually get, answered plainly. If pricing or a security detail isn’t final yet, we say so here rather than guess.

Do the people I send this to need to create an account?

No. Respondents never sign up, never set a password, and never get an account they didn’t ask for. There is no respondent login anywhere in the product — the link you send is the only thing they need.

What happens if someone gives a vague or incomplete answer?

Acquainto asks a follow-up before moving on — the same way a person would ask “can you tell me more about that?” instead of accepting the first thing said. That’s the difference between a form and a conversation: a form takes what it’s given, this asks again.

Who sees the answers?

The organization that sent the conversation sees the answers. No other Acquainto customer can, and we do not give them to any other organization. The respondent is told which organization is receiving the answers before they answer anything — the conversation carries that organization’s name and its brand in the header of every screen, and a Privacy link in the footer of every screen goes to how the answers are handled. No surface and no setting removes either of them. Where a start card is shown first, that card says the same thing at more length and in so many words. They are told again on the review screen, before they confirm and send.

That is not the same as saying nothing else touches them. The conversation is run by an AI model served by a third-party provider, so the questions and the answers reach that provider; the completion email to the organization contains the answers, so it crosses an email relay. Those are the services Acquainto is built on rather than parties with an interest in the answers — but they are real, and you should hear about them from us rather than find them. We keep a current list of every service that can see respondent data and what each one sees. Ask us and we will send it.

How does it show up in our systems?

As a structured record delivered by webhook the moment the conversation ends. The body carries one field per question, keyed by the question keys you chose, so it can be written straight into your own columns without anyone reading a conversation first. A choice question arrives twice over — as the stored choice, which survives you rewording the option, and as the wording itself for anything a person will read.

Answers arrive in the type they really are. A rating is a number, an amount is a number with its currency beside it, and a date is 2026-10-01 however the respondent wrote it — so “rating above 7” is a rule you can write without converting anything first. Google Sheets gets the same thing: amounts, counts, ratings and dates land in real number and date cells, with the currency and the rating range in the column heading. A phone number the respondent gave without a country code is marked as such rather than given an invented one.

The delivery also says which language the conversation was held in, so one eflow running across several markets can be filtered or routed by market without anyone reading the answers first. It is blank when there was nothing to work it out from — a conversation answered entirely by tapping options types nothing — and it is never filled in from the language the eflow is set up in. Nothing is translated: the answers are exactly what the respondent wrote.

The word-for-word conversation travels in the same delivery, as transcript — every turn in order, so you never need a second call to see what was actually said. It is also readable in Acquainto under Responses, and available on its own at GET /v1/responses/{id}/transcript.

Unusually long conversations are trimmed in the webhook body and flagged with transcriptTruncated. The API copy is never trimmed.

The delivery says whose answers these are. If you invited the person with a personalized link, the identifier you gave for them arrives as subjectRef — usually their email or your own customer id — so a response can be matched to the record it belongs to without a second lookup. It is blank when there is nothing to say: the respondent came through a public link or an embed, the link was made without an identifier, or your retention window for respondent labels has since cleared it.

You can also look a response up by it: GET /v1/responses?subjectRef=... returns only the responses whose identifier exactly matches, so you can pull everything tied to one person without paging through the rest.

Anything else you attached about the person when you created that invitation comes back too, as prefill, handed back exactly as you sent it. It is in the webhook body, under metadata on GET /v1/responses/{id}, and in a column of its own in the exported file. It is simply absent, rather than empty, when the invitation carried none. These are not answers: the assistant never sees them, still asks the questions they cover, and the answer is allowed to disagree — so where a prefilled detail and an answer conflict, the answer is the newer fact.

If you paste your own tag onto the plain hosted link — ?aq_ref= — it comes back too, as ref, in the same places subjectRef does: the webhook body, GET /v1/responses, the exported file, and a Ref column of its own in Acquainto. Unlike subjectRef it is never verified — anyone who sees the link could have edited that part of the URL — so it is always labeled unverified and never used to look anything up. Both can be present on the same response; they never merge.

If you don’t have a webhook endpoint yet, a hosted link or embed still works; the record just waits for you in Acquainto until you’re ready to wire one up.

Can it match our branding?

Yes, by default. Set one brand color and the whole conversation takes it — launcher, message bubbles, buttons, progress. Acquainto appears once, in small type, at the bottom. Your customer is answering you, not a vendor they’ve never heard of.

Upload your logo and it goes at the top of the conversation. How it appears depends on the shape of the file. A wide logo — the kind with your company name written in it — runs across the full width of the header on its own strip, at a size we set, so it is never cropped and never competes with the rest of the card. Because that version already says who you are, we do not print your company name underneath it as well.

That strip is white unless you change it. Logo row background in Settings -> Branding sets its color, and it will not save one that hides your logo — setting the strip to the same color your logo is drawn in makes the logo disappear entirely, so the panel measures it, shows you, and keeps your old color. If you want the strip in your brand color, upload the all-white knockout version of your logo that your brand guidelines almost certainly include.

A square logo, or anything close to square, sits in a small circle instead, with your company name beside it as text. That is the right home for a symbol with no words in it: stretched across the header it would be a small mark in a lot of empty space.

Either way you upload one file and we work out which of the two it is. You can also upload a separate icon for that circle — useful if your logo is the wide, name-carrying kind and you’d still like an icon next to each question. An icon takes over the circle immediately, on every screen that draws one. The header with a wide logo on it is the exception: the strip already names you there, so nothing is drawn beside the line underneath it.

On the links you send, you can also have the page behind the conversation carry a wash of that color instead of neutral gray. That one is off until you turn it on.

Two small things stay ours on those hosted links: the line at the bottom, and the icon a browser puts in the tab. Both come off together on the plans that include it. Anywhere you embed the conversation in your own site, the tab is already yours.

Where can it run?

Embedded on your site with one script tag — either inline in the page, or as a chat box in the corner — sent as a link, or printed as a QR code. Same conversation, same engine, wherever your customer meets you. See how each use case works in more detail.

What does it cost?

Every plan includes a set number of completed conversations a month, and that number is the thing you choose between — you are not charged per seat. The plans and what each one costs are on the pricing page.

We’re onboarding our first customers by hand, on purpose, so there’s no card to enter and no plan to pick on the way in. Start a free trial and we’ll set the first conversation up with you.

Can I get a refund?

Yes, on an annual plan, in two cases:

• Your first year. A full refund if you cancel within 14 days of the initial purchase.
• A renewal. A full refund of that renewal if you cancel within 30 days of the renewal date and have not used Acquainto since it renewed. “Used” means one of your eflows took a new respondent session, or you created, edited, or published an eflow.

On a monthly plan, and on anything else you have already paid for, fees are not refunded for part of a period — except where the law requires it.

Two things worth knowing before you ask. The money goes back to whatever you paid with. And the account is disabled the moment the refund is issued: your eflows stop accepting new respondents and you cannot create or publish one, though everything you have already collected stays readable and exportable. A refund ends the subscription rather than pausing it.

There is no refund button, deliberately — a person checks the dates and the usage and then issues it. Email support@acquainto.com with the plan and the date it renewed, and you do not need an account to ask. If you are signed in on an annual plan, Cancel subscription in Settings offers the refund at the point you are deciding.

Terms of Service section 5 is the full text, and it is what governs if this summary and it ever disagree.

What languages does it support?

Twelve: English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Turkish.

A respondent gets whichever of those their own browser is set to, and there is nothing for you to switch on. Write your questions once, in your language. When someone opens the conversation with their browser set to Turkish, we translate your questions into Turkish and ask them in Turkish — from the first question, not from the point they happen to type something.

This applies even though you wrote in English. It is worth being direct about that, because it is a real change in what your respondents see: an eflow written in English will answer a Turkish-speaking visitor in Turkish. That is how the other survey tools behave too. If you would rather everyone got the language you wrote in, put ?lang=en on the end of the link you send — a language named in the link always wins over the browser.

You can use the same parameter to force any of the twelve: ?lang=tr opens in Turkish whatever the browser says.

A browser asking for a language that is not on the list gets the language you wrote in, rather than a half-translated conversation.

What is machine-translated, and what is not

The translation is done by a language model, once per eflow per language, and then reused for everyone after. Nobody at Acquainto reviews it. We are direct about this because none of us can tell a natural Turkish question from a stilted one, and you may well have someone who can — read your own eflow through a ?lang= link before you send it anywhere that matters. Open that link twice: the first open is the one that produces the translation, for the reason below.

Two things stay in English for now:

• The chat window’s own controls — the Send and Skip buttons, and headings like “Looks right, send it” on the summary screen. Your questions and answer options are translated wherever they appear, including on that summary, which lists the questions in the words they were actually asked in. It is the furniture around them that is still English.
• The answers you receive. People answer in their own language, and that is what reaches your webhook, export and email — Turkish answers arrive in Turkish. Every response records which language it was held in, so you can tell them apart, but we do not yet translate answers back for you to read.

The first person to open it in a new language sees your original wording

The translation is made the first time somebody opens your conversation in a language it has not been asked in before, and it is made in the background while that person is already reading. So the very first respondent in a new language reads your questions in the language you wrote them in. Everyone after them gets the translation, which is ready within seconds and is then reused.

This is worth knowing mainly because of how you will find it. You open your own ?lang=tr link to check the Turkish, you see English, and it looks like the feature is not working. It is — you were simply the first person to ask for Turkish. Close the conversation and open it again and the Turkish is there.

Editing a question does the same thing on a smaller scale: the question you changed goes back to your original wording for the next person who opens it, until its new translation is ready. The questions you did not touch keep theirs.

Ask us where a particular language stands for your use case. Coverage is something we are still actively working on, and we would rather tell you what is solid than guess.

How is our data protected?

Tenant data is isolated per organization, encrypted in transit, and access is scoped and logged. We’re publishing the fuller trust and security detail as that work ships — in the meantime, ask us directly and we’ll answer specifically, not with a generic statement.

Does it support two-factor authentication?

Yes, and there are two ways to do it: a passkey (a fingerprint, face, or device PIN — no code to type) or an authenticator app that generates 6-digit codes. Both live under Sign-in security in Your account. A passkey confirmed with a fingerprint or face signs you in on its own, with no password step at all; an authenticator-app code is asked for alongside your password, including sign-in with Google. Either way, you get ten one-time recovery codes the first time you set either one up.

It is per person: each of your colleagues turns it on for themselves, and there is no account-wide setting that requires it of your whole team yet. The people answering your eflows are unaffected, because respondents never sign in at all.

Turn on two-factor authentication has the steps, the recovery-code detail, and what to do if you lose the phone.

What if I have a question this page didn’t answer?

Email support@acquainto.com. At this size, that means the people building it — not a queue. You do not need an account to ask.