Your rating dropped. You found out three weeks later.

No. Vela doesn't write anything for you, and that's a deliberate choice. AI-generated replies are easy to spot and frequently make a bad situation worse. A customer who left a real complaint deserves a real response from the person who owns the place. What Vela does is make sure you know about the complaint, understand the context, and have the specific language showing up in your reviews, so when you reply, you're responding to the actual problem, in your own words. Your voice. Your call.

Birdeye and Podium are built around review generation: getting more customers to leave reviews. That's a different job. Vela is built around review intelligence: understanding what your existing reviews are telling you before it costs you customers. We don't send mass texts to your customers asking for reviews. We watch what's already being said and tell you the moment the pattern turns.

No. Vela connects to your Google Business Profile and Facebook page through the platforms' standard business APIs, the same way you'd authorize any third-party app. You authorize access, and you can revoke it from your Google or Facebook settings at any time. We never see or store your account password.

Yes, and here's why. With low review volume, each review carries more weight. One 1-star review can move your rating by 0.1 or 0.2 points when you only have 40 total. Vela tracks the absolute impact of each review on your rating and flags it immediately. Slow review volume actually makes individual reviews more dangerous to ignore, not less.

Only Single Location does. The $39 single-location plan includes a 7-day trial: cancel anytime and your card is never charged. Multi Location ($99) and Business Network ($299) are built for operators who already know they have a multi-location problem to solve, so those plans skip the trial.

It is the opposite. The anxiety usually comes from not knowing what is in there, and then opening reviews one by one without any context. Vela reads everything first and gives you a clear summary: here is what came in, here is what kept appearing, here is the one thing worth your attention. You are not staring at a wall of feedback. You are reading a digest that tells you what actually matters. When an alert fires about wait times or a specific shift, that is a systems problem, not a verdict on you personally. Most owners find that knowing is significantly less stressful than the version where they avoided it.

All paid plans deliver alerts in real-time, within minutes of a new review being indexed on Google or Facebook. If a complaint cluster starts forming at 7pm on a Saturday, you'll know by 7:15.

Yelp is on our roadmap. We made a deliberate choice to build Google and Facebook first because they represent the majority of review volume for most SMB categories. Sign up and we will notify you first when Yelp is ready.

It depends on where you are in your billing cycle. If you cancel during the 7-day trial, it ends immediately. Your card is never charged if you cancel. If you cancel during a paid monthly subscription, you keep full access through the end of your current billing period, then the subscription stops with no further charges. Either way: no friction, no fees, two clicks from your account settings. What changes in both cases is visibility. The trend lines, complaint pattern history, sentiment tracking, and your Reputation Health Score all stop updating. The risks to your reputation don't stop, you just stop seeing them.

Yes. No contracts, no cancellation fees, no "talk to sales" loop to get out. Cancel in two clicks from your account settings. Your data remains accessible until the end of your paid period, then we delete it per our privacy policy.