Question 1

What is Ripplewatch?

Accepted Answer

Not alerts. Not data. Answers. Ripplewatch is competitive intelligence built for small tech companies, not a fractional hire: it monitors the competitors you choose and scores every signal (a pricing change, a job posting, a news mention) against your own positioning, ICP, and the real reasons you've lost deals or churned customers, then rolls it all up into a single Momentum score per competitor.

Question 2

Who is Ripplewatch for?

Accepted Answer

Product marketing, sales and revenue teams at B2B software companies that track a handful of competitors and want a straight answer when someone asks whether a competitor's move matters. If you already have a competitive intelligence program run by a dedicated team and want battlecards deployed into your CRM, a platform like Crayon or Klue may fit better; here is how they differ.

Question 3

How does Ripplewatch compare to Crayon and Klue?

Accepted Answer

Crayon and Klue are platforms your team logs into and adopts, sold through a sales cycle with no published pricing. Ripplewatch Connect runs inside Claude and other AI assistants over MCP, so you ask about your competitors where you already work, and its pricing is published: $29 a month plus usage you prepay for. It has no verified buyer-interview program like Klue's and no battlecard authoring like Crayon's. See Ripplewatch vs. Crayon and Ripplewatch vs. Klue.

Question 4

How is this different from other competitive intelligence tools?

Accepted Answer

Most tools tell you what changed and stop there, leaving you to figure out whether it matters. Ripplewatch scores every signal against your specific business context using a fixed, ordered rubric: the same signal can be High relevance for one company and Low for another, because it's judged against what actually affects that business, not a generic severity scale.

Question 5

What data sources does it monitor?

Accepted Answer

Pricing pages, job postings, news coverage, and funding announcements, continuously, for every competitor you track. If you connect Slack, HubSpot, Gong, or Zoom, it also draws on sales-call mentions and CRM deal notes to sharpen its judgment.

Question 6

Does it use my sales calls or CRM data?

Accepted Answer

Only if you connect Gong, Zoom, or HubSpot yourself, and only to add context to scoring, for example recognizing that a competitor's price cut matches a reason you've actually lost a deal. You can disconnect any integration at any time in Settings.

Question 7

What is the Ask feature?

Accepted Answer

A chat interface scoped to your own tracked competitors and business context. Instead of waiting for the next update, you can ask something like "what has this competitor changed recently that matters to us?" and get an answer grounded in your last 90 days of signals.

Question 8

What is Momentum?

Accepted Answer

A single directional score (Heating up, Steady, or Cooling) for each competitor, built from what we already track: hiring velocity, pricing activity, product and feature changes, press and funding coverage weighted by whether it's actually good or bad news for them, how our own relevance scoring is trending, and your win/loss record against them, plus GitHub commit activity if you're tracking an open-source competitor and add their repo. Each input carries more or less weight depending on how consistently we've actually had real data for that specific competitor, so one stale signal can't swing the score the way a well-populated one can. It's meant to answer "is this competitor getting more or less dangerous" at a glance, without you having to read six separate trend charts.

Question 9

How do I get win/loss data into Ripplewatch?

Accepted Answer

Whichever fits how your team already works: paste a CSV export or sync HubSpot deals from the dashboard's Win/loss section, push outcomes programmatically via POST /api/v1/win-loss the moment a deal closes, or just forward or CC a "we lost this deal" email to your personal address shown in Settings → Developer (Dashboard plan, or via the assistant if you use Ripplewatch Connect). All three feed the same pipeline, and update each competitor's Momentum win-rate trend immediately.

Question 10

What is Ripplewatch Connect?

Accepted Answer

Ripplewatch Connect is an AI competitive intelligence analyst built into Claude or ChatGPT, with you at all times instead of a dashboard you have to remember to open. You add Ripplewatch as a connector, then ask what changed with your competitors, what it means for your deals, and tell it how deals went, all in the chat. It's a separate product from the dashboard plans: $29 a month plus usage you prepay for. See how it works, or how to get the most out of it.

Question 11

Can I use Ripplewatch from Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with Ripplewatch Connect, through our MCP server (see the docs). It works with assistants that support remote MCP servers over HTTP, including Claude (web, desktop, and Claude Code) and developer tools like Cursor. ChatGPT can add custom MCP servers from its Plugins page, but it depends on your plan and workspace: OpenAI currently lists full support for Business, Enterprise and Edu, with more limited read access on some other plans, and an admin may need to enable it. Gemini supports MCP in Gemini CLI, but we haven't confirmed support in the Gemini app. You connect by signing in and approving, or with an API key for developer tools. Step-by-step setup.

Question 12

What can an AI assistant do with my Ripplewatch account?

Accepted Answer

It can read your competitors, momentum, signals and trends, ask questions answered against your positioning, and, only when you tell it to, add a competitor, log a won or lost deal, log customer feedback, or update your positioning and ICP. It can't change billing or team settings, and you approve every connection and can disconnect it in Settings → Developer.

Question 13

How much does Ripplewatch Connect cost?

Accepted Answer

$29 a month for the platform, plus usage from a balance you prepay (from $50). Each answer and each competitor you watch draws from that balance at our actual AI cost plus a small margin: typically a few cents an answer and a dollar or two a month per competitor. Teammates are unlimited. Taxes are added at checkout.

Question 14

What happens when my Connect balance runs out?

Accepted Answer

Answers and competitor monitoring pause until you add funds, so you never owe for usage on credit. Each answer shows what it cost and what's left, and you can add funds any time from Settings.

Question 15

Can I get a refund on Ripplewatch Connect?

Accepted Answer

Yes, within 30 days: the $29 platform fee is refundable, and so is any balance you haven't used. Balance already used on answers and monitoring isn't refundable. Email us and we'll take care of it.

Question 16

Do I need the dashboard to use Ripplewatch Connect?

Accepted Answer

No, and you don't get one: Connect is a separate product for people who'd rather ask Claude or ChatGPT than log in. Your account has Ask and Settings (billing, balance, connector, competitors). The Ripplewatch Dashboard is a separate product: one fixed-price plan with no usage bill.

Question 17

Can I cancel anytime?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Cancel whenever you want from Settings; it takes effect at the end of your current billing period, and there's no penalty or lock-in. And if you're within 30 days of any charge, email us and we'll give you a full refund, no questions asked.

Question 18

Do you offer a free trial?

Accepted Answer

Not a traditional free trial. Instead, every plan comes with that 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can actually use Ripplewatch for real, against your real competitors, before deciding it's for you.

Question 19

Why don't you offer a free tier?

Accepted Answer

Because the value you're getting isn't a static dashboard, it's a live AI model reading and scoring every signal against your specific business context. Every pricing change, job posting, and news mention we surface has actually been analyzed by Claude in real time, not pulled from a cache and shown to everyone the same way. That analysis has a real, per-signal cost to us on every account, whether or not that account is paying. A free tier would mean covering that cost indefinitely for accounts that never convert, which isn't something we can sustain at our size. Instead we put that money into the 30-day guarantee, so you can use the real product risk-free without us subsidizing free usage forever.

Question 20

Do you offer annual billing?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on every plan: annual billing is 20% cheaper than paying monthly.

Question 21

Do you have a referral program?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Any paying customer can generate a shareable link from Settings → Referrals. The company you refer gets 2 months free the moment they sign up, and you get 2 months free of your own once they've been an active, paying customer for 60 days (not immediately, this keeps the reward tied to a referral that actually sticks, not a signup that cancels right away). Multiple successful referrals stack. See our Terms of Service for the full details.

Question 22

What happens if I add more competitors than my plan allows?

Accepted Answer

You can add as many as you like, but only up to your plan's limit stay actively monitored (the earliest ones you added). The rest are visible but paused until you upgrade or remove one to make room.

Question 23

Is there a setup fee?

Accepted Answer

No. You only pay the plan price shown on the pricing page.

Question 24

Do you sell my data?

Accepted Answer

No. We don't sell your personal or business information to anyone, for any reason.

Question 25

Is my data used to train AI models?

Accepted Answer

No. Relevant parts of your business context are sent to Anthropic's Claude models to generate your relevance scores and answers, but that data isn't used to train Anthropic's models or ours beyond producing your own results.

Question 26

How is my data kept separate from other customers?

Accepted Answer

Every account's data is isolated at the database level, so one customer's competitors, signals, and business context are never visible to another.

Question 27

What happens to my data if I cancel?

Accepted Answer

We keep it for a limited period in case you reactivate, and delete it sooner if you ask us to.

Question 28

How is my data encrypted?

Accepted Answer

Everything is encrypted in transit over HTTPS/TLS, and encrypted at rest in our database using our provider's standard AES-256 encryption. We never store your payment card details ourselves; Stripe handles all card processing directly on their own PCI-compliant infrastructure.

Question 29

How do I get started?

Accepted Answer

With Ripplewatch Connect, sign up and walk through a short onboarding flow: tell us your positioning, your ICP, and the competitors you want tracked, and scored updates start showing up as soon as the first crawl runs. Prefer the Dashboard? Book a demo and we'll set it up with you.

Question 30

What integrations do you support?

Accepted Answer

Slack for delivery, and HubSpot, Gong, and Zoom for extra context on scoring.

Question 31

How do I contact support, and how fast do you respond?

Accepted Answer

Email hello@ripplewatch.ai; we respond within 3 days.

Question 32

Where can I read more about the competitive intelligence market?

Accepted Answer

We put together a full survey of the CI landscape, how 14 different tools approach monitoring, what they cover, and where the gaps are, in our State of Competitive Intelligence report.

Frequently asked questions

Product

Pricing & billing

Data & security

Getting started