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The questions that actually come up. If yours is not here, ask us directly.

Looking for how our numbers are produced? Read the methodology — sources, formula, weights and confidence levels, in full.

Getting started

What should I do first?: Run a keyword search on a topic you already want to cover. It shows you what is ranking and gives you an opportunity score you can compare against other topics. Promote the most promising gap into a project, then write the script from there.
Do I have to connect a YouTube channel?: No. Connecting one calibrates opportunity scores to your subscriber count, lets you build a brand voice from your own uploads, and pre-fills the video picker. Bench Optimize also runs on any YouTube link you paste, so it works without connecting anything. Most other tools work without a channel too — training a brand voice on your own uploads is the one that requires it, and caption fetching by URL works for any public video with a caption track either way.
What does onboarding actually change?: Your niche, audience and default language pre-fill the idea generator and script writer so you are not retyping them. You can change all of it in Settings.

How do credits work?: Each action costs a fixed number of credits, shown before you run it. The full price list is on the pricing page. Charges happen before the model call, so parallel requests cannot overdraw your balance.
I was charged for something that failed.: You were not — refunds are automatic. If a generation errors, a job exhausts its retries, or a research call fails, the exact amount is returned to your balance and appears as a Refund line in the credit history on the Plan & credits page.
Why did a research search cost nothing?: It was served from cache. A cached result costs us no upstream API call, so it costs you no credits. Cached results are labelled and show the time the data was originally fetched.

What permissions do you request?: Read-only YouTube access (youtube.readonly) plus your email address. We cannot upload, edit or delete anything on your channel.
How are my tokens stored?: Google refresh tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they touch the database and are only ever decrypted inside the server module that calls Google. They are excluded from data exports and redacted from logs.
How do I disconnect a channel?: On the Channels page. Disconnecting revokes the grant at Google immediately and clears our stored tokens — it is not just a local flag.
Can I get my data out?: Yes. Settings → Your data downloads a JSON export of projects, ideas, scripts and every version, transcripts, thumbnails, generated results, research history and your credit ledger. It is your workspace data rather than your files: anything you uploaded is not bundled into the download, so keep your own copies of those.

A tool says it is “not configured on this server”.: That feature needs an API key the server operator has not set. It is a deployment configuration issue, not a fault in your account, and nothing is charged for it. Where we can name the exact environment variable required, the message does.
Research says the YouTube quota is exhausted.: The YouTube Data API has a daily unit allowance that resets at midnight Pacific time. Search is the expensive call at 100 units. We report exhaustion honestly rather than serving stale results.
I cannot get a transcript for a video.: Fetching by URL works for your own videos and for any public video that has a caption track. If it fails, the video most likely has no caption track for us to read — the import says so and nothing is charged. You still have three routes in: the bookmarklet on the Transcripts page reads the video's transcript panel in your own browser and sends the lines here with their timestamps intact, you can paste the text or upload SRT/VTT, or you can upload the audio and we will transcribe it. Pasted plain text has its timing labelled as estimated; everything else keeps real timings.
My confirmation email never arrived.: Check your spam folder first, then use the resend link in the banner at the top of the workspace. Your welcome credits are granted when the address is confirmed, so an unverified account starts at a zero balance — if a resend still does not arrive, contact us and we will sort it out.

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