Frequently asked questions

Pay It Forward (PIF) is a place to make gratitude visible. When someone helps you, you acknowledge it — and the app suggests concrete ways to pass that kindness on to someone else. Each acknowledgement becomes a link in a traceable ripple.

Someone does something kind for you. You acknowledge it on Pay It Forward — your turn to give appears, ready to pass on. Our AI suggests 3–5 concrete ways you could pass it on, tuned to your skills and location. You help someone, and that becomes the next link. The ripple grows and you can see it visualised as a graph.

It's a small, visible reminder that someone helped you and it's now your turn to help someone else. Every time you acknowledge a kindness, one appears. Your turn never expires — it's a gentle invitation, not a debt. Use it whenever the moment is right.

Yes — the entire core experience is free forever. Unlimited acknowledgements, chain visualization, and AI-powered suggestions are all included on the Free plan. No credit card, no hidden limits. Optional Pro and Premium plans add deeper analytics for power users who want them.

Pro and Premium unlock deeper insights into your ripple — smarter AI suggestions, richer chain views, exportable graphics, and detailed analytics. They're about seeing further into how your gratitude travels, not about unlocking more kindness.

Yes — we're piloting Team plans with org dashboards and CSR-ready impact reports. SSO (SAML / SCIM) and EU data residency are on the roadmap. Email hello@payitfwd.app to join a pilot.

Agentic AI means our system doesn't just answer questions — it takes initiative. Our Gratitude Scout notices when someone helped you. Our Chain Orchestrator finds the best person for you to help next and drafts the message. Our Impact Narrator writes your chain's story. You're always in control — every action needs your approval.

Yes. All three AI agents are available on the free plan. Pro and Premium plans offer deeper analytics and insights, but the agents themselves are free for everyone.

When you open your turn to give, we build a short prompt from the originating moment, your profile (skills, industry, location), and recent activity — and ask Claude for 3–5 concrete ways you could pass it on. If no AI key is configured, we fall back to a curated list so the feature never disappears.

Every acknowledgement points to its parent — the moment it grew out of. That parent-child relationship creates a directed graph: when you open a ripple, you see the original moment and every downstream gesture it sparked. Click any node to filter the timeline to that person's contributions.

From any ripple page, click Share this ripple. We'll generate a read-only public link anyone can open — no sign-in required. You can revoke the link any time and it stops working immediately.

Nothing. Your turn never expires and nothing gets taken away. After about a week we'll send one gentle email with three ideas — if it's not the right time, ignore it. The point is invitation, not obligation.

Most referral tools track the referral itself. Pay It Forward tracks what happens AFTER — the hire, the opportunity, the career move. And it tracks the chain: when the person you helped helps someone else, you see the downstream impact you created.

Your Impact Score reflects the real-world outcomes you've helped create through referrals, introductions, and mentorship. It's calculated from acts of support you've given, verified outcomes, and the downstream reach of your chains.

Yes. Your Impact Score and chain data can serve as evidence of mentorship, collaboration, and leadership in performance reviews, promotion cases, and professional profiles. We're building export features to make this easy.

HR and talent teams use Pay It Forward to track employee referrals, measure mentorship program outcomes, report on diversity and inclusion impact, and generate CSR reports with verified data.

Every acknowledgement has a verification status — pending, confirmed, or flagged. The person you helped confirms it with one click; until they do, the moment stays visible but marked as awaiting confirmation. Suspicious patterns — self-referencing loops, the same pair acknowledging many moments in a short window — get automatically flagged for review. We'll add stronger verification (anchoring to real-world signals like LinkedIn-confirmed intros) as the network grows.

Pay It Forward is purpose-built for traceable relationship impact. We focus on one thing: turning referrals, intros, and mentor calls into a verifiable graph of who helped whom — and what came of it. The product ships AI-powered suggestions for passing it on, a visual chain view, outcome tracking, and shared templates for both individuals and companies. A generic networking tool can replicate the form factor; replicating the chain graph, outcome data, and the discipline around verification is a different problem.

They can build a similar feature — but the value lives in the network and the chain data that accumulates with every user. Each acknowledgement enriches the graph, and the graph is what powers suggestions, verification heuristics, and chain-level impact reports. We're also designing deep integration with how professionals actually ask for and repay favors — something general-purpose platforms won't prioritise.

When you acknowledge a kindness you can flag it anonymous — your name won't appear in the other person's feed or in the public ripple view. Your account still needs a real email so we can verify it and notify you when someone acknowledges your help, but that email is never shared with anyone else.

Yes. We never sell your data. Profile info and acknowledgements are only shared with the service providers we use to run the app (hosting, email, auth). Full details in the Privacy Policy.

Open your profile, scroll to Account, and click Delete account. Your personal info is removed and your contributions are anonymised so the ripples other people built on top of them stay intact.

Email hello@payitfwd.app — we read every message. For feature requests or bugs, that address is the fastest way to reach us.