Pre-release: what to expect

OrderDen is pre-release software. This page says exactly what that means for you, because the answer changes what you should and should not put into it.

What pre-release means here

You can sign up and use the free tier today. It is not a trial and not a crippled demo — it is the whole product, and nothing is held back behind a paywall, because there is no paid plan yet.

There is no support model. Nobody is on call, there is no response time, and there is no promise that a message will be answered at all. That is not us being coy about a queue; there is no queue.

There is no guarantee that your data will be preserved. Data may be lost, reset or migrated without notice. A database may be rebuilt, an environment discarded, or a data model changed in a way that does not carry old records forward. The service may be discontinued at any time.

No liability is accepted for any loss arising from using the service, from something going wrong, or from the service being shut down. The full position is in the Terms of Service.

What to do about it

Keep an independent copy of anything that matters. This is the whole of the advice, and it is actionable today, on every plan:

• Company Settings → Your data → Full download gives you one .zip with every client, quote, order, invoice, payment, setting and uploaded file — spreadsheets for the lists, JSON for the complete records. See Your data.
• Every list exports to CSV instantly from its own page, whenever you like.
• The API will hand you the same records programmatically, on every plan including Free, if you would rather script it.

If a record would hurt to lose, export it and keep the export somewhere we do not control. Do not treat OrderDen as the only copy of anything.

Tell us what breaks

This is the most useful thing you can do with a pre-release product, and the reason it is public at all.

There are two ways in, and they reach the same place.

From inside OrderDen, on any screen and on any plan: Something wrong? at the bottom of the sidebar, or the last chip in the menu strip on a phone. It opens over whatever you were doing rather than navigating away, so a half-finished invoice is still there when you close it. You do not type your address — it goes against the one you signed in with.

That form sends three things along with your message, and shows you all three before you send: the screen you were on, the version you are running, and your email address. Nothing else from the page goes with it. It is there so a report from the invoice screen does not need a paragraph explaining which screen.

From the public site, at /feedback: an email address, one big box and a button, for anyone without an account. It asks you to answer a small arithmetic question — a captcha we run ourselves, so the page loads no third-party script and nothing about your visit goes anywhere else. Get it wrong and nothing is lost: what you typed comes back with the form.

Either way it goes to a person. Say what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. We read every one and we answer the ones we can, from the address you sent it from; there is no support model, so there is no reply time to hold us to. A bug that somebody reported is a bug that gets fixed a great deal faster than one nobody mentioned.

Hearing when it is really released

There is a Notify me box on the front page, in the pre-release notice, and on your dashboard while you are on the free plan. It does exactly one thing: sends you one email, when there is a real product. Not a newsletter, not a drip sequence, not a tips-and-tricks series.

It is double opt-in. When you submit the form we send a single email asking you to confirm, and until you click the link in it your address goes no further — nothing else is ever sent to it. That is deliberate: the form is public, so anybody could type your address into it, and an address nobody confirmed is an address nobody asked for.

Every message carries an unsubscribe link, and one click ends it.

The legal documents

The Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy are published and linked from the footer of every page. Both are marked as a pre-release draft that has not been reviewed by a lawyer — they were written to describe accurately what the product does, and they will be reviewed and reissued before OrderDen takes money or serves customers outside the United States.

When you create an account, the version of those documents in force is recorded against your account with the date and time. If they change in substance, you will be asked to accept the new version rather than being assumed to have.

Two things in the Privacy Policy are worth knowing without reading it: there are no analytics, no third-party trackers and no advertising technology anywhere in OrderDen, and receipt scanning runs on our own server rather than being sent to a third-party service.