The offer, first
We are running a pilot for Echo OS. Approved businesses get $250 in credit toward the work their business twin does. You can apply up to four times, three months apart, which tops out at $1,000 across the whole program.
The full terms live on the pilot page. This essay is the reasoning behind them.
Why credit and not a free trial
A free trial is a countdown. It measures how long you have, which means the clock is the product’s opinion of you: hurry up and decide. Two weeks in, you have learned whether you can install something, not whether it can run your business.
Credit measures something else — how much work you actually asked for. A business that puts real load on its twin will spend $250 faster than a business that pokes at it. That is the right sorting. We would rather find out what you use it for than how quickly you can be pressured.
There is a second reason, less noble and worth admitting: every answer a twin writes, every call it takes, costs us money the moment it happens. Credit is the honest unit because it is the unit the work is actually billed in. A trial pretends the cost is zero until a date, then pretends it is enormous the day after. Credit just tells the truth continuously.
What the credit covers
The credit pays for the work your twin does — the answers it writes, the calls it takes, the tasks it runs. When your twin does something, the cost comes out of the credit first, before anything you have paid for.
Here is the part most announcements would bury, so we will put it in its own paragraph: the credit does not pay for a subscription. Plans are billed separately, to your card. If you are on a paid plan during the pilot, you are still paying for the plan. The credit is for the work, not the seat.
We are being blunt about that because the alternative is worse. If we wrote “credit toward your plan and usage” and you discovered at your first invoice that only half was true, we would have bought a little enthusiasm today and spent all our credibility to get it. That is a bad trade at any price, and a catastrophic one for a company asking businesses to hand it their operations.
What expires, and when
Credit expires 90 days after we apply it. Whatever is unused on day 91 is written off — not refunded, not rolled over.
We could have quietly omitted that. Expiry is the clause every promotional page is tempted to leave for the fine print, because it is the one that sounds least generous. But an expiry you discover later is not a term, it is an ambush. Ninety days is also the honest shape of the thing: this is a pilot, and a pilot with no clock is just an indefinite discount pretending to be an experiment.
The three-month gap between applications is deliberately the same rhythm. Use a pool, see what happened, come back and tell us.
Why a person reads every application
There is no promo code here. No coupon field, no voucher, nothing to paste at checkout. You email us, a person reads it, and if it is approved we place the credit on your account by hand.
That is slower than a code, and we chose it anyway. A code is a broadcast — it goes to whoever forwards it fastest, which is rarely whoever needs it most. Reading applications means we learn what businesses actually want to put on a twin, which at this stage is worth more to us than the efficiency we are giving up. It also means we can say no, kindly and specifically, instead of letting a form say nothing at all.
So: applying is not the same as being approved. We reply either way.
What we have not decided yet
We have not published a list of qualifying criteria, because we do not have an honest one yet. We could invent a checklist that sounds rigorous — years in business, headcount, a category list — and it would be theatre, reverse-engineered to look official.
What is true is that we confirm eligibility when we read your application. Tell us what your business does and what you want the twin to run, and we will tell you where you stand. When we have criteria worth publishing, we will publish them on the pilot page rather than leaving them to be guessed at.
The bet
Echo OS is an operating system for a business — a twin that talks, remembers, and acts, with decisions coming to you and work going to agents. That is a large claim, and the correct response to a large claim is show me.
The pilot is us paying for the first stretch of showing you. Not a countdown, not a locked demo, not a sales call with a slide about ROI. Two hundred and fifty dollars of your twin doing real work, on us, and then an honest conversation about whether it earned its place.
If that sounds like the right trade, the pilot page has the terms and the way in.