How Autopilot works
Autopilot is the feature people most want and most distrust, which is the correct instinct about anything that acts on your behalf. So this guide is organised around the limits rather than the capabilities — because the limits are what make it reasonable to switch on at all.
The sentence that matters most
That is the app's own description of your spending ceilings, and it is the whole safety model in one line. Every limit you set is a limit Autopilot operates under. It cannot decide the ceiling was too low and adjust it. If it needs more, the only thing it can do is ask you.
Which means the worst case is bounded by numbers you chose, rather than by how well the software behaves.
It works to a plan you agreed
Autopilot does not invent a direction. You build a plan with Soclo AI — starting from your goal, in conversation — and that plan is saved as text you can read. Not a hidden model of your business: an agreed statement you can open, check and disagree with.
You can clear it at any point, and the app is clear about what that means: Soclo goes back to planning from your goal alone. So the plan is revocable, and reverting is a defined state rather than an unknown one.
Being able to read the instruction that software is acting on is unusual, and it is the thing to make use of. If Autopilot is producing work you do not like, the plan text is the first place to look.
The controls, and what each one actually decides
Spending limits
- A daily credit cap. Stops the day's spend at your limit and resets at midnight. This is the one that prevents a bad day becoming an expensive month.
- Always ask above. Any single action costing more than an amount you set needs your tap. Useful even when you trust the daily cap, because it catches the one expensive thing rather than the many cheap ones.
- An ad spend ceiling, in pounds, if you let it spend on advertising at all — with a separate limit on the most it can put behind any one post.
Advertising is its own switch. Leaving it off means Autopilot handles content and never money, which is a sensible place for most businesses to stay.
Before it posts
Whether work goes out on its own or waits for you. Start with waiting. You can loosen it later in one tap, and the first fortnight of seeing what it would have posted is worth more than the time it saves.
What Soclo makes
How much, and to what standard — how many pictures a week, and a quality setting where, as the app puts it, better looks sharper and costs more credits. That trade-off is stated rather than hidden, which lets you spend deliberately.
How often it tells you
Weekly gives you one Sunday summary instead of a nudge per post. For most people running a business this is the right setting — a per-post notification stream is how people end up ignoring the app entirely.
Which accounts
Including whether it may use accounts you connect later. Leave that off unless you want it, so connecting a new platform in six months does not silently widen what Autopilot touches.
Running and paused are both visible states
The app says plainly whether Soclo is running or paused, and pausing stops everything: nothing runs until you switch it back on. That is a real stop, not a slowdown, and it does not require unwinding your settings first — you can pause for a week and resume with everything as it was.
Use it. Pause during a holiday, during a complaint, during anything happening publicly that scheduled cheerfulness would land badly against.
A cautious order for switching it on
- Fill in the Brand Kit first. Autopilot writes from it. Switching on before that is the single most common way to get output that sounds like nobody. The Brand Kit guide covers it.
- Set the ceilings before anything else, lower than you think. They are easy to raise and impossible for Soclo to raise.
- Require approval before posting. Everything waits for you.
- Leave ad spending off. Content first; money later, if at all.
- Agree a plan, and read it back. If the plan text does not describe your business, fix that now rather than judging the output later.
- Run it for a fortnight on approval-only. Approve, edit or reject each item, and notice which you reject and why.
- Then loosen one thing. Usually letting the routine posts go out unattended while anything unusual still waits.
Every step is reversible in a tap, which is why it is worth being conservative at the start rather than cautious forever.
What it is not for
- Replying to customers. That is the inbox, and it has its own much stricter rules — see automatic replies, where complaints, money, promises and requests for a person always come to you.
- Deciding your prices or offers. Those come from your Brand Kit and are yours.
- Anything time-critical. A launch, an event, a correction — do those yourself.
- Replacing judgement about your own business. It handles the routine so the non-routine gets your attention, which is the whole argument for it.
What to check in the first month
Once a week, four things: what it posted, what you rejected and whether a pattern is forming, what it cost in credits against your cap, and whether the plan text still matches what you want. Ten minutes.
If you are rejecting most of what it produces, the fault is almost always upstream — the Brand Kit or the agreed plan — rather than in the individual posts.
Where to go next
What Soclo will never do without asking covers the boundaries that hold whatever your settings. How credits work explains what Autopilot is spending, and reading your Results covers judging whether any of it worked.
Common questions
Can Soclo raise its own spending limit?
No. The wording in the app is explicit: Soclo can never raise this — it can only ask. Every ceiling you set is a ceiling it operates under, not a starting suggestion it can adjust.
Will it post things I have not seen?
Only if you set it that way. There is a separate control for what happens before it posts, so you can require your approval on everything, and you can change that at any time without unwinding the rest of the setup.
How do I stop it?
One switch pauses everything. The app states the consequence plainly — nothing runs until you switch it back on — so a pause is a genuine stop rather than a slowdown.
What stops it spending my credits in a day?
A daily credit cap that stops the day’s spend at your limit and resets at midnight, plus a separate rule that any single action costing more than an amount you choose needs your tap first.
Does it decide what to post on its own?
It works to a plan you agreed. You build that plan with Soclo AI, and it is saved as text you can read and clear. Clearing it sends Soclo back to planning from your stated goal alone.
Will it use accounts I connect later?
Only if you tell it to. That is its own setting, so connecting a new platform does not silently widen what Autopilot may touch.
How often will it interrupt me?
You choose. Weekly gives you one Sunday summary rather than a nudge per post.
Still stuck? Tell us the screen or address, what you expected and what happened. Never send a password, verification code or full card details.
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