Answers

Every answer counts toward the team's allowance except a reply to a question asked in the app, and the count covers all of a team's products together. A page given in place of an answer does not count, and neither does a refused question.

Extra answers come in packs, which add to the month's allowance. Plans and billing has the packs and what they cost.

The count starts on the team's sign-up date while it is on its trial, and on its plan's period start after that.

These limits are the same on every plan. A question over one of them is refused, and the hour is counted over the last sixty minutes.

Once a team has used its month's answers and every extra answer it bought, a visitor's question gets pages instead of an answer. The same happens once visitor questions in the last hour reach the team's hourly number above. For a team on its trial, this applies only once payments are open, as If answers are paused says.

A visitor reads that these pages best match the question, with up to three of them, and a line on how to reach the team through the Contact page. If no page matches, the visitor reads that no page answers this yet. The Contact line appears only when the team can be reached; otherwise the visitor reads that the team can see the question. A question from a teammate is still answered and never replaced with pages.

Until Cactus opens payments, a team on its free trial is never paused, and its answers are not limited.

Once payments are open, a team with no plan is paused when its free trial ends, or when it still needs a card. A team that signed up before payments opened gets three more days after the opening first. A trial team, once payments are open, has Pro's answers and limits.

Answers come back once the team picks a plan. Plans and billing explains how a team picks one.

While it works on an answer, Cactus shows the step beside its name:

• Reading the code
• Reading how many pages
• Searching
• Searching past chats
• Checking past answers
• Checking what shipped

An answer names up to three of the pages it used, and a visitor is shown only the public ones. When only the team's own material backs an answer, a visitor reads, in place of an answer, that it is the team's own information and can't be shared there.

When Cactus cannot settle every part of a question, it digs into your code only for the open parts it picks; the rest show their not-found line at once, and the answer says it has passed them to your team. A product with no code never digs. Once a dig has kept parts, the first reply's not-found lines for those parts stand at the card's foot, under its answer. Handoffs covers how a teammate picks that part up.

Once a question is with your team, a visitor who asks after the team's reply, or says they are still waiting or still stuck, gets one sentence saying the team has their message and where the reply will come. That reply comes here, in this conversation, and by email only when your team holds an address for them. That sentence is never a not-found line, and the conversation is never handed over again; the answer then helps with the problem from your pages and code, and asks the visitor to describe it when nothing in the conversation says what it is.