Frequently Asked Questions

Usually because they changed something you didn't see in time — dropped their prices, launched a promotion, added a service, extended their hours, or started an ad campaign — and you only found out weeks later when your bookings dropped. MyIntelBrief watches your competitors' websites and news every day and emails you the morning something changes, with a specific suggested response. So a competitor can't quietly take your customers before you even know why.

You could check every competitor's pricing page by hand every morning — most owners don't have the time. MyIntelBrief does it for you: we read your competitors' websites every day and compare each page against what it said yesterday. When a price, a package, a promotion or a discount changes, that change appears in the next morning's brief with the old value, the new value and the date we first saw it. In practice this is how owners catch a competitor quietly testing a higher price, or dropping a standing discount they had run for months — moves that are invisible if you only look once a quarter. One real brief flagged a rival that raised prices 16% on a Wednesday; the owner would not have known until a customer mentioned it. Each change also carries one recommended response, so the brief ends in a decision rather than a data dump.

That is exactly the gap MyIntelBrief closes, and it is the hardest question to answer alone — you cannot notice what you have never seen. Your daily brief surfaces the services, offers, hours and positioning your competitors have that you do not, drawn from their own public pages rather than guesswork. A service-gap matrix shows, side by side, what each rival lists and what you list, so the holes are visible at a glance instead of inferred. One brief showed a med spa that the competitor in its own neighbourhood led on IPL photofacials. Some gaps are worth closing and some are worth ignoring — the brief names the gap and suggests one response, and the decision stays yours.

You don't need to install anything or manually spy on competitor sites. MyIntelBrief fetches each competitor's public pages daily and diffs them against the previous copy, so you see what actually changed rather than a whole page to re-read. That covers pricing and packages, service and menu additions or removals, new locations and hours, staff and hiring pages, and the claims they make about themselves. Website changes are usually the earliest visible signal a competitor is moving: a new service page goes up weeks before the advertising starts. Everything comes from publicly accessible pages, and your competitors are never notified, because we read their site the way any ordinary visitor does. What lands in your inbox is the diff, dated, with one suggested response — new prices, new pages, new offers, updated hours or services, in plain language in your morning brief.

Often because they're publishing more, collecting more reviews, or updating their site more often than you are — the kind of steady activity you'd have to catch by hand. MyIntelBrief surfaces competitor website and content activity in your daily brief, and the local ranking heatmap at /local-ranking-heatmap shows where you rank vs competitors across your market so you can see the gap and close it.

Ask a general assistant what a competitor charges and you may well get an answer. What you will not get is a date on it. You cannot tell whether that price is from this morning, from last quarter, or from whenever the tool last looked — and it will not tell you, because it does not know either. Acting on an undated number is the part that costs you. It is also one answer, to one question, about one rival, at the moment you happen to ask. That is a different thing from knowing your market. The gap is not what any of them can read. It is that nobody is watching between your questions. Ask again next month and nothing can tell you the price changed — because nothing kept yesterday's copy to compare against. We keep a dated copy of every competitor page, every morning, and report only the difference — $16 became $18.50 on Tuesday, the happy-hour page came down, two hygienist roles went up. That is an archive problem, not a writing problem, and it is why this is a standing service rather than a prompt you run once. The other half is showing up: this arrives whether or not you remember to ask.

Most mornings your competitors do nothing, and the brief says so in a line. It is one page, ranked, and quiet days stay quiet — that is what makes the loud ones readable. There is also a dashboard if you would rather look than be told, but the email is the product: it arrives whether or not you remember to check.

Those are built for enterprise teams with an analyst to run them, and priced for it. They are competitive intelligence tools — a CI tool, in the shorthand most teams use — sold at enterprise prices. This is for the owner or consultant who needs the same answer without the seat count or the sales call. See the side-by-side: vs Crayon, vs Klue, vs Kompyte.

Yes. The free demo at myintelbrief.com/demo runs on your real competitors in about a minute, with no signup and no card. The 7-day trial does ask for a card, and nothing is charged until day 8 — cancel any day before that and you pay nothing.

A former defense intelligence professional — the daily brief is the format that discipline runs on. There is no name on this site by choice. More about who we are and who we serve: /about.

Yes — the Free Competitor Finder at myintelbrief.com/free-competitor-finder. Type your business name and it shows your real local competitors, named, on a map. Your first lookup needs no account, no email and no credit card. After that we ask for an email before running more. It is discovery only: the competitor list, not the daily brief.

It depends which one you mean. The Free Competitor Finder needs no card at all. The 7-day free trial DOES require a card — Stripe collects it when you start and you are auto-billed on day 8 unless you cancel first. Cancel free from your Account page any time before day 8 and you are not charged.

Yes. In Account Settings you can add extra recipients for your daily brief. They are added as BCC on the same email you receive, so recipients cannot see each other's addresses. Paid plans allow up to 5 extra addresses, the Student plan 1, free accounts none. You can also point one address at a group alias such as team@yourcompany.com.

MyIntelBrief monitors your competitors' websites and news every day, then emails you a morning intelligence brief summarizing what changed and what you should do about it. You tell us your business and competitors — we do the rest.

7 days. A card is required to start it, but you are not charged until day 8 — cancel before then and you pay nothing. The trial is the FULL product on the plan you picked: live data from today, your competitors named (no masking), and the complete action steps. It is not the delayed public demo. (To try MyIntelBrief with no card at all, run the free demo instead — no card or email needed.) If you cancel during the trial, briefs and the paid features stop right away; your data stays safe until you upgrade.

One per location. Each location gets its own brief, because each has its own competitors — we find them within a few hundred metres of that specific address, so your Scottsdale competitors are not your Tempe competitors. Two locations need Pro (up to 3 businesses); one location is Starter. If both locations sit in the same trade area and genuinely share the same rivals, one business monitoring that area may be enough — run the free demo on each address and compare the competitor lists before you decide.

Because the thing that matters is the CHANGE, and a change is invisible unless you remember exactly what the page said last time. Someone checking weekly sees today's prices; they do not see that the $45 service quietly became $52 eleven days ago, that two reviewers mentioned a new competitor by name, or that a rival started hiring installers. Google Alerts fires when a name is MENTIONED somewhere — it stays silent when a competitor changes their own pricing page, because nobody wrote an article about it. We read the competitors' own pages and local signals every morning, diff them against yesterday, and send only what actually moved. An hour a week of someone's time gets you a snapshot; this gets you the delta, on the morning it happens.

You get a brief every morning, seven days a week, delivered early (around 6 AM ET). You can narrow that to specific days in your account settings if you would rather not hear from us at the weekend.

Yes. Restaurants, retail, home services, healthcare, legal, real estate, automotive, fitness, salons, dentists, med spas, furniture retailers, property managers, industrial suppliers and more — the method does not depend on the trade. The only real requirement is that your competitors exist publicly: a website, a Google listing, or a job posting is enough for us to watch them, and that describes very nearly every local business. It works outside the United States too, anywhere Google has listings; briefs have run for businesses in Toronto, Bangkok, Osaka, Budapest and Goa alongside US cities. What changes between industries is which signals matter most — a restaurant cares about menu and hours changes, a dentist about insurance and coverage changes, a contractor about hiring and permits — so the brief weights what it reports to the kind of business you actually run.

English only at this time. Multilingual brief delivery is planned for a future release. Email info@myintelbrief.com if your business depends on briefs in another language and we'll let you know when it's available.

All prices are in USD. Starter: $79.99/mo (1 business, 10 competitors). Pro: $229.99/mo (3 businesses, 20 competitors). Enterprise: $1,499.99/mo (10 businesses, 25 competitors). If any remaining founder slots are still available, INTEL50 takes 50% off forever and is applied automatically at checkout — there is no code to enter.

If any remaining founder slots are still available, INTEL50 takes 50% off your subscription price forever — not just the first month — and it is applied automatically at checkout, with no code to enter. In that case Starter is $39.99/mo, Pro $115.00/mo and Enterprise $750.00/mo. It is a limited early-subscriber offer (first 100 paying customers), so if the slots have run out the standard prices apply instead. The pricing page always shows the live state.

One-time $16 briefs: if the brief is not useful to you, email info@myintelbrief.com within 7 days and we refund it in full. We will ask what was wrong with the brief so we can fix it, but the refund does not depend on your answer. Subscriptions work differently. During the 7-day free trial, cancel before day 8 and you are never charged at all. Once a subscription term has been paid, we do not refund it — you keep full access to the end of the month or year you purchased. You can stop your renewal at any time from your Account page; that ends future billing but does not refund the term you are already in. If something went wrong on our end, email us — we do work with people on edge cases.

Log in → Account → Cancel Subscription button, two clicks. You will see your access end date. DURING THE 7-DAY TRIAL: you are never charged, and the paid features stop right away — briefs and scans end the moment you cancel. ON A PAID PLAN: you keep full use of the tool until the end of the month or year you already paid for, then it stops. No further charges either way.

Yes — upgrade anytime from Account → Pricing. Downgrades take effect at the next billing cycle. Contact info@myintelbrief.com if you need help.

Yes — every paid plan has a Monthly | Annual toggle at the top of the pricing page. Annual is 17% off (equivalent to 2 months free). Example: Pro is $229.99/mo or $2,299.90/year (saving $459.98/yr). You can also switch from monthly to annual mid-subscription — Stripe prorates the unused portion of your current monthly payment as a credit toward the annual charge, so you only pay the difference today. We send a reminder email 30 days before each annual renewal so you can review before the charge hits.

All payments are processed in USD only via Stripe. Your card issuer handles any currency conversion.

Yes — every signal comes with a specific recommended action, not just the observation. If a rival cuts prices the action is a non-price response (we report competitor pricing but never advise you on your own prices). If a rule change affects a service you sell, the action names the real choice: what compliance would require, whether that service still covers its costs, or whether to stop offering it.

Yes, when it applies — and only when it genuinely does. The same brief flags a regulatory or licensing change that narrows what you or a rival may offer, a supply or input-cost squeeze on something you buy, a product recall affecting goods you stock, weather that will visibly affect footfall, and open federal bid opportunities in your state. One brief surfaced an Extreme Heat Warning running across three days — the kind of thing that empties a walk-in schedule — alongside the competitor news. These sections stay silent when there is nothing real to report: a quiet day says 'all clear' rather than inventing significance. Competitors remain the core of the brief; everything else earns its place only by mattering that day.

No. A business you own is never a rival — a second location, a sister shop, a trading name or a subsidiary. Those are dropped and the seat goes to a real competitor instead. If one does slip through, remove it from your Competitors page and it stays out.

No, and that is deliberate. We report what competitors publicly changed, including prices, but we never recommend that you raise, lower, match or undercut yours — a third party advising many competitors on pricing raises real antitrust concerns. Where a rival changes price, the recommended action is always a non-price response.

AI-generated reports can contain errors or omissions. We monitor publicly available information about your competitors, but the AI can misinterpret content. Always verify important findings directly at the competitor's website before making business decisions.

In the free demo and the emailed preview brief we withhold real competitor names — you see Competitor A, Competitor B, and so on. They are deliberately hidden, not missing or made up: the preview is public and anyone can run it on any business, so naming real businesses to a stranger would expose exactly the intelligence our paying subscribers pay for. The moment you start a trial the masking comes off — every competitor is named, and we track all of them rather than the three shown in the preview.

The public demo and the emailed preview run on an intentionally delayed historical snapshot, so a date it mentions may already be in the past. That is expected, not a bug — serving live data publicly would give away the current intelligence our subscribers pay for. The real product delivers today's data every morning. Your free 7-day trial lifts the delay and the name masking together.

No. The 60-90 day delay and the competitor-name masking apply to the PUBLIC demo only — they exist so that serving live data publicly does not give away what subscribers pay for. Starting a trial lifts both immediately: from your first brief you get today's data with every competitor named.

Our system uses Google Places + AI to find local competitors. If a competitor is missing, add them manually (paid plans). If a business is wrong, remove them from your Competitors page. Accuracy improves with a specific business type and city.

This can happen if a competitor's site was unreachable or nothing significant changed. Try clicking "Run Intelligence Scan" again. If it consistently fails for a specific competitor, email info@myintelbrief.com.

Paid users can type their top business concerns (e.g. "how to bring in more dine-in customers") in the concerns box on the dashboard. The AI cross-references your concerns against recent competitor activity and suggests a targeted action plan.

Yes — every daily brief is built to be agent-readable. Three encodings, same data: (1) a brief-YYYY-MM-DD-yourbusiness.jsonl attachment you can save and drop into any LLM-based AI service that accepts file uploads; (2) machine-readable data-* attributes embedded in the email HTML for agents that parse incoming mail; (3) a JSON URL in the email footer that returns the full structured brief. Schema reference: /docs/brief-schema. Practical examples: /help/jsonl-briefs. We do not recommend any specific AI agent — that's a trust decision only you can make based on your own security requirements.

No. AI agents need full access to your email inbox to work, and that's a serious trust decision — much bigger than choosing a tool to read MyIntelBrief specifically. Our policy is to make our briefs agent-readable but never to recommend a specific vendor. Pick whichever AI agent fits your security requirements, data residency needs, and budget. The two broad categories to research on your own: LLM-based AI services that ingest your inbox, and no-code automation platforms that hook into your email. We don't endorse any of them. Our brief schema is documented at /docs/brief-schema so any agent can be programmed to read it.

Check spam/promotions first. On the login page, click "Resend verification email". If it still doesn't arrive, email info@myintelbrief.com with your signup address.

Click "Forgot password?" on the login page. Enter your email — a reset link arrives within 5 minutes (valid 2 hours). Check spam. If you signed up with Google, use "Sign in with Google" instead.

Email info@myintelbrief.com from your current registered address requesting the change. We process it within 1 business day.

Email info@myintelbrief.com with subject "Delete my account" from your registered address. We delete all your data within 30 days per our Privacy Policy. Note: cancelling your subscription does not delete your account.

Check spam/promotions and add info@myintelbrief.com to your contacts. Briefs send every day, early in the morning (around 6 AM ET). If still missing after 24 hours, email info@myintelbrief.com.

Cancellation stops future billing but does not issue a refund for the current period. If you were charged after your access end date, email info@myintelbrief.com with your billing details — that would be an error we want to fix.

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sessions use secure HttpOnly cookies. All traffic is TLS encrypted. We never sell your data. See our Privacy Policy at /privacy for full details.

We monitor publicly accessible information about your competitors — the same information anyone could find by visiting their websites or reading public listings, just gathered every day instead of once in a while. That means their public web pages, Google Business listings and reviews, public job postings, published news coverage and press mentions, and public regulatory or licensing records where they apply. Nothing here is secret and nothing requires an account, a login or a scraped private source; we simply read what is already open and record what changed since yesterday. Your competitors are never notified that you are watching, because we access their pages exactly the way any ordinary visitor does. The value is not access to hidden information — it is that somebody checks every single day and tells you the one thing that moved, instead of you remembering to look. We respect site policies and store only AI-generated summaries, not raw website content.

No. Our service is for commercial small businesses only. We do not monitor government agencies, defense contractors, military facilities, or critical infrastructure.

Please email info@myintelbrief.com before contacting your bank — we can usually resolve it faster. If you file a chargeback, we provide your bank with evidence of service delivery and your agreement to our no-refund policy, and suspend your account.