From signing in to your first draft

1. 1. Sign in

   Enter your email and open the link we send, or continue with Google. There is no password to choose. New accounts start with 100 credits so you can see the product work before paying for it.

2. 2. Connect Upwork

   On Integrations, press Connect Upwork. You are sent to Upwork's own authorization screen and back. We ask for read access only, your password never reaches us, and you can revoke the grant from Upwork at any time.

   We read your profile once on connection: title, summary, skills and rate. That is what makes a proposal reference your real background instead of generic claims.

3. 3. Turn on notifications

   Also on Integrations. Email is one toggle and goes to your account address. Slack takes an incoming webhook URL and is the better choice for anything time-sensitive, because mail can lag by minutes.

   Press Send a test on each. It pushes a real message through the real sending code and writes down what the provider said, so a misconfiguration shows you the actual error rather than silence.

4. 4. Create a search

   A search is a standing question: which postings are worth your attention. Keywords, skills, budget floor, client filters, and how often to look. Creating one costs 5 credits; editing it afterwards is free.

5. 5. Wait for the first check

   Searches poll on their own schedule, at most every 60 seconds. The first one usually lands within that window. Every check, including the ones that find nothing, is recorded on the search's Activity page.

Each poll of each search runs the same five steps:

1. Fetch. Your filters are sent to Upwork's official GraphQL API and it returns matching postings.
2. Filter. Postings that are too old for the window, restricted to a country you cannot work from, or already seen by this account are dropped. Nothing here costs anything.
3. Score. Claude reads each remaining posting against your profile and this search, and gives it a relevance score.
4. Draft. Postings that clear the score bar become matches. On a search set to write drafts, a proposal is written for each, up to the day's cap, at 10 credits a draft.
5. Tell you. Everything from that run is collected into one message per channel rather than one per posting.

Each search has one setting that matters more than the rest:

• Writes drafts for me. When a posting matches, a proposal is written immediately and waits for your review. Costs 10 credits per draft. Use this for searches you trust: the whole point is that the letter is ready before anyone else has finished reading the post.
• Just tells me. When a posting matches you get a notification and nothing else. You open the ones you like and press Draft. Nothing is spent until you ask. Use this for a new search whose filters you are still tuning, or for a market you want to watch without committing credits to it.

You can switch a search between the two at any time, and the switch is free. A sensible pattern is to start a new search on Just tells me, read a few days of matches, tighten the filters, then turn drafting on.

Open the search and press Activity. It lists every check with what it saw and what came of it, which separates the two explanations that look identical from the outside:

• Empty feed on most runs means your filters are too narrow for what is actually being posted. Widen the keywords or drop a client filter.
• None relevant on most runs means postings are arriving but not scoring well against your profile. Usually the keywords are catching adjacent work. It is also worth checking your Upwork profile is synced, since that is half of what the score is judged against.
• Nothing new means the same postings keep coming back, which is normal on a narrow search in a slow category. Lengthen the poll interval and stop watching it.
• Run failed means the connection to Upwork needs attention. Reconnect from Integrations.