How the Growth Engine works

The Growth Engine is a built-in program that runs your business's roadmap. It is the same Willo as the chat, with the same tools for content, research and site work, minus a few it is never given (below), running on a schedule instead of waiting for you.

How it picks work

It works through your roadmap:

Plan. When the roadmap runs low, it plans new tasks from your goals and recent results.
Do. Otherwise it takes the top ready task and does it fully: the research, the copy, the page change. Each finished task is reviewed against your goals.

What it does shows under Business → Activity.

How often it runs

On every paid plan the engine is due every hour. Not every hour spends anything: if the daily budget is used up or the business is paused, the run stops before doing any work and costs nothing.

What limits its spending

Two things, and no others:

The daily budget. Daily budget (credits) on the Autonomous-spend budget card under Settings → Autonomy. The budget covers the last 24 hours, rolling. When spending reaches it, autonomous runs pause and the card shows Autonomous runs paused. They start again by themselves once the last 24 hours' spend falls back under the budget, or straight away if you raise the budget. Resume autonomous runs clears the pause, but it comes straight back while spend is still at the budget.
The plan's credits. Each run uses credits like the same work asked for in chat. When the credits run out, so does the engine.

There is no monthly limit on the number of runs.

What it does

Research, writing and editing content and pages, SEO, site and product changes, and reading the business's own numbers: revenue, customers and email results. Unless you untick a kind of work under What the Growth Engine works on, it works on every ready roadmap task, product and code changes included.

What it won't do

The engine is never given the tools to:

send email, including campaigns, or message you;
run builds or shell commands;
change anything in Stripe, such as creating products;
delete or unpublish content;
settle decisions that are waiting for you.

Those stay with you, in chat. Posting to social media, buying ads, outbound sales and dealing with suppliers also stay with you: Willo doesn't act on those channels, so the engine doesn't either.

Content it writes is a draft unless auto-publish is on for that collection.

When it pauses itself

The engine skips its scheduled runs, without you changing anything, when:

nobody in the organisation has used Willo's chat for a week. Send a message and it carries on within a few hours;
a cancellation is scheduled for the plan that pays for the business. Undo the cancellation and it carries on;
the plan is paused. It carries on when the plan resumes.

None of these change the Growth Engine card's own switch, which only you control.

Growth Engine or Agent Program?

The Growth Engine works your roadmap: open-ended, choosing its own next task. An Agent Program does one job you define, on its own trigger, with only the tools you give it. Use a program for "every Monday, send me a digest"; use the engine for "keep growing the business". The engine shows on the Agents tab as a built-in program, and can be paused but not edited or archived there.

On plans without Agent Programs, queue repeated work as roadmap tasks: see Steer the Growth Engine.