Choosing an Automate tier when clients ask for sources

You have already bought a contact export, checked half of it by hand, and found rows that matched nothing. The reassurance did not come from the vendor page. It came from your own spot checks. That is the figure to keep in view once you move list building into Automate: how many rows you can evidence before a client opens the sheet.

Because work runs inside your own connected accounts, the rows carry the trail of the account they came from. The activity log records what each step touched, so the story behind a row travels with it. You are not asking anyone to trust a black box. You are handing over the same sequence you would have run manually, with a record of it.

The tiers change how much of that work you can push through in a period. They do not change whether a row is verifiable. Verification is still your job at the end, and the platform gives you the trail to do it faster than a spreadsheet you filled by hand.

There are three lifetime levels: Starter, Growth and BYOK unlimited. Each one gives you the same connection screen, so the apps your clients already use stay in one place rather than in a separate tab for every tool. The guided setup walks you through connecting an app and confirming the account before a sequence uses it.

Starter and Growth differ in the amount of work you can run through that shared connection layer. If your month is a steady handful of client lists, the entry level covers the pattern. If you run several client accounts through the same screen at once, you are buying headroom rather than a different toolkit.

BYOK unlimited sits apart because it hands the model side to you. You supply your own provider key and that provider bills you directly for each request. In exchange, the tier does not meter the same way. Read it as a choice about who carries the model cost, not as a bigger version of the other two.

The real question is not which tier sounds right. It is whether you can still stand behind a list when a client emails to ask where a specific row came from. If the answer is a shrug, no tier helps. If the answer is a log entry and a visible account, the tier question becomes a volume question you can actually settle.

That reframes what you are buying. You are not buying more contacts. You are buying a repeatable process you can point at. The connection screen and the activity log are the parts that let you show your work, and they sit at every level. The tier only changes how many of those runs you can carry in a sitting.

So answer that first: can you trace any row you hand over? Once yes, the rest is arithmetic. Count the lists you deliver in a typical month and pick the level that covers it with room for a busy client.

Moving up from Starter to Growth buys headroom. More of the same guided runs through the same connection screen, for the months when two clients want their lists in the same week. Nothing about how you verify rows changes, and nothing about the activity log changes. You are paying for capacity rather than a different set of steps.

The BYOK unlimited level buys a different arrangement. You bring your own model key, so model usage is billed by your provider, and the tier is unlimited on its side. That suits a contractor who already runs a provider account and would rather see one model bill than have it folded into a lifetime purchase.

Before you choose, check the published tiers on softwareprogrammer.app and read what each one includes. Pricing for all three is set out there on the publisher's own table, so compare the levels against your actual monthly volume rather than against a feature list you hoped to see.