Live, early access, in design: what each one means here
We publish pages for products you cannot buy yet. This is the vocabulary we use to say which is which, and the rule we hold ourselves to when a product moves.
Comsky is building a lot of things at once, and several of them have a page on this site before they have a customer. That is a reasonable thing to do and an easy thing to do dishonestly, so it is worth writing down the vocabulary.
There are three words on this site and each one means something specific.
Live
Sold and supported today. You can open an account and use it now, there is a price on the page, and the button takes you into the product rather than to a form.
If a page says Live, the only thing between you and the product is a signup.
Early access
Running with a first group of customers. The product is deployed, it is in daily use, and it is not yet general availability — which usually means some combination of a pilot still running, a security review not yet done, or a part of the product that works but has not been proven across enough different customers.
An early-access product has a real app behind it. What it does not have is our word that every edge has been found. When we put a product here, the honest version of the pitch includes which parts are still settling, and our product pages are written to say so by name rather than in general terms.
In design
There is nothing to sign into. No build, no beta, no trial, and usually no date.
The page exists because we would rather state publicly what we intend to build than keep it in a deck, and because the quickest way to find out whether something is worth building is to put it where people can tell us. But a page for a product in design carries no feature table, no comparison against a competitor and no price — because every one of those would have to be invented, and a grid of ticks against a product that does not exist is the most convincing way to be wrong.
If a page says In design, the useful thing on it is the form.
The rule, which is the actual point
A product’s stage is read from one place, and every tag, button and label on the site is derived from it.
That sounds like an implementation detail. It is the whole mechanism. The alternative — each page saying what it says — is how a site ends up describing a product as “in build, shipping through 2026” on the same day that product starts billing customers. That happened here, to Comsky Chat, and it was the product’s own documentation that caught it rather than anybody reading the website.
So the stage lives in one file, the pages read it, and changing it changes the whole site at once. A page cannot quietly disagree with the catalogue, because it is not allowed to have its own opinion.
Two smaller rules that follow from it
No invented prices. A product with no approved price shows a dash, not a plausible figure. The dash is unhelpful and we would rather be unhelpful than retract a number somebody has already taken to their finance team.
No invented customers. We have customers. We do not have written permission to name most of them, so we do not name them — no logos, no quotes, no “trusted by” counts. When somebody says yes in writing, they go on the page.
Where everything currently stands
The products page lists all of them with their current stage, and the early-access page lists only the ones you cannot simply sign up for, split by which of the two reasons applies.
If a page on this site ever contradicts one of those two, the products page is right and the page is a bug. Tell us.