What the first 30 days look like, by lane.
Onboarding walkthroughs · v1 · 2026
Each retainer has a different onboarding shape. Pick the lane you're evaluating to see the actual flow — Day 0 (Stripe checkout) through Day 30 (first executive PDF) — before you sign.
Why these exist
The most common pre-checkout question in our inbox is some version of "what actually happens after I pay?" Below is the literal answer for GEO, written out in full — the intake form’s real fields, and the Day-1 welcome quoted from the page that already publishes it. Audit Retainer and Cluster Ops are summarised below but not yet written out; we would rather say so than print three headings and call it a walkthrough. Buyers in serious evaluation mode usually want to see the flow once before committing — these pages exist for that read.
Each walkthrough mirrors the post-checkout reality. If something on the live page differs from what's described here, that's a documentation bug — reply to info@garnetgrid.com with the discrepancy and we'll reconcile.
Pick your lane
GEO · 30-DAY PREVIEW
GEO onboarding walkthrough
Citation polling, schema PR pack, llms.txt curation. From intake form (Day 1) to first executive PDF (Day 30).
| When | What happens | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Stripe checkout. The receipt is the record of the charge and arrives immediately. | Nothing. Keep the receipt. |
| Day 1 | The intake form. Five fields, three to five minutes — your name, your organisation or context, which tier sounds closest, the nature of the confidential work, and the best way to reach you. Two of the five are required; the rest help and can be left blank. | Fill it in. The work field is the one that shortens everything after it. |
| Day 2 | First citation poll runs against your buyer questions. | Nothing. You get the first reading by email. |
| Day 7 | First weekly drop — what moved, what did not, and what we changed. | Read it and push back on anything that looks wrong. |
| Day 30 | First executive summary covering the month. | Nothing. It arrives at the address on the receipt. |
What the Day-1 welcome actually says
Quoted from /account/geo/welcome/, which publishes it already — so this is the real artifact, not a sample written for this page:
The other two lanes follow the same shape — checkout, intake, first reading, weekly drop, monthly summary — but their walkthroughs are not written yet, and the sample monthly PDF this page used to promise does not exist. Both are named here rather than implied.
AUDIT RETAINER · 30-DAY PREVIEW
Audit Retainer onboarding walkthrough
Snapshot writer Worker, four-axis audit, weekly drift diff, engineering tickets in your tracker. From intake (Day 1) to first PDF (Day 30).
CLUSTER OPS · 30-DAY PREVIEW
Cluster Ops onboarding walkthrough
Monitor process deployment, traffic-tuned model placement, hot-swap protocol exercise, cost-per-token baseline. Intake to first PDF.
Common questions across lanes
How long does onboarding actually take?
The intake call is 30–60 minutes; the intake form is 3–5 minutes. From Stripe checkout to first deliverable: typically 24–48 hours for the first daily snapshot, 7 days for the first weekly drop, and 30 days for the first monthly executive PDF. The full retainer cadence is in steady-state by the start of month 2.
What if onboarding gets stuck?
Reply to your welcome email. The same engineer who handles delivery handles intake — no support ticket queue, no account-manager wall. SLA is <1 business day on Pro, <4 business hours on Scale, <2 hours on Enterprise.
Can we delay onboarding (e.g. waiting for legal sign-off on repo access)?
Yes. Subscriptions are month-to-month; the polling / snapshot / event-routing infrastructure runs from Day 1 regardless of when the customer-side prerequisites land. The first executive PDF auto-defers if a required input is missing.
What does cancellation look like?
Cancel any time via the Stripe customer portal (link in your dashboard footer). The last full report still ships at month-end. Workers and R2 buckets remain in your Cloudflare account; Garnet's read access is revoked. Your historical snapshots and PDF archive stay yours indefinitely.