What happens after you click Start free

The last question people ask me before they sign up is almost never about features. It's some version of "what actually happens after I click the button?"

Fair question. Most software answers it with a setup wizard that assumes you have a free afternoon, and most of us don't. So here's the plain version: what the Free plan gives you, the four things worth doing first, what Lia does on her own and what she waits on you for, and when paying us starts to make sense.

What Free actually includes

No credit card. Free doesn't ask for one.

Inside it you get 5,000 each of leads, loans and referral partners, which is more database than most people bring over on day one. Email from your own inbox is unlimited on every plan, Free included. Connect a Google or Outlook account in Settings, and every one-to-one email you send from Leaf360 goes out from your own address with no monthly cap.

Campaign email is a different thing, and I want to be clear about the line. A blast to a whole pipeline, or the mail a workflow sends on its own, runs through the marketing add-ons, and those live on Pro. Emailing a client about their conditions from your connected Gmail is inbox email, and that's unlimited on Free.

You also get 100 Ask Lia credits a month. How many a request uses depends on the job, and I'm not going to quote you a per-question number, because it'd be wrong half the time. Everyday questions cost far less than document review or a long research run. Paid plans are unlimited, so you stop counting.

The Leaf360 TPO marketplace is on Free as well. Browse wholesale lenders, ask a scenario, connect with an AE, before you've paid us anything.

And for a limited time the Leaf360 MCP server is on every plan, Free included, which is how people run their Leaf360 workspace from Claude or ChatGPT.

Prices for everything above Free are on the pricing page. I'm not going to restate them here and let them drift.

The first four things to do

Connect your mailbox. This is the one that changes the product from a database into something you work in. Once Google or Outlook is connected, your email lands in the Leaf360 inbox next to calls, texts and partner conversations, and Lia can read and draft against it. Nothing else you set up matters as much.

Set your stages before you import anything. Leaf360 keeps three stage sets apart on purpose: sales stages for leads before they apply, loan stages mapped from the statuses your LOS sends, and business partner stages for agents and title reps. Filters, mass actions, SLA rules and the stage picker on every record all read from that setup. Build it after you've worked a few hundred records and you're remapping records you've already touched.

Import your database. The importer is four steps. Choose leads or partners, upload the CSV, map your columns to fields, then review every row with the mapping applied and fill in anything missing in bulk. Partners need a first and last name. Leads are looser than that.

Two things to know before you run it. A row matching a record you already have updates that record instead of creating a second one. The finished import reports Created and Updated as separate counts, but it won't tell you in advance which rows will match. So run fifty records first and read the counts. And if a whole import goes wrong, Import History under Data and Integrations in Settings will reverse it, showing you exactly what it deletes and restores before you confirm. Loans use a separate importer. Do not mix them. I wrote the longer version of this in how to switch mortgage CRMs without losing a deal.

Ask Lia one small question. Not the big one. Something you already know the answer to, like which leads in your pipeline need attention today. The point is to see the shape of an answer and the Results panel it lands in before you trust her with something that matters.

What Lia does, and what she waits for

This is the part people are actually nervous about, so I'll be specific.

Records are proposed, not written. Ask her to create a lead, a contact, a loan, a task or a note, and she puts a record card in the Results panel with the fields she understood, anything still required marked. You edit it, then click the button at the bottom. Only then does the record exist. Close the panel without clicking and nothing was saved.

Workflows are created as drafts. Describe an automation and she gathers the trigger, the actions, the timing and the conditions, summarizes what she's about to build, and creates it turned off. Turning it on is a separate thing you do after reading it.

Texts are the exception, and they send immediately. Ask Lia to text a client and the message goes out right away from your team's number and gets logged on the record. There's no card to approve first. Confirm the wording in the chat before you ask, not after.

That's the whole permission model. Two things wait for you, one doesn't.

When to upgrade

Move up when you hit a wall you can name, not on a schedule.

The usual walls are the credit ceiling, automation, and the phone. Free covers regular use and then stops. Workflows and reporting start on Core. Calling, texting and the marketing add-ons start on Pro. The pricing page has the current numbers and the full comparison, and you can move up later without losing anything you built.

If you want the longer explanation of what an AI Operating System for mortgage means for a loan officer's day, that's on the loan officers page, and there's a short Lia preview if you'd rather watch than read. Product steps live in the help center at help.leaf360.com, which stays current in a way a blog post can't.

Sign up, connect the mailbox, ask her one question. That is the whole first session.