One of the most common things people ask when they first understand what HERE does is: "Can it send reminders to my customers when payments are overdue?"
The answer is no. HERE never messages your customers. It only messages you.
This surprises people. The capability would be technically straightforward — HERE already understands which customers have pending payments, it already has the amounts and the dates, and it's already connected to WhatsApp. Sending an automated message to a customer saying "Sharma ji, ₹12,500 ka payment pending hai" would take a few lines of code.
We decided not to build it. Here's why.
Customer relationships are yours, not HERE's
The relationship between a merchant and their customer is built over years of personal interaction. The merchant knows that Sharma always pays late but always pays. They know that Rajinder is reliable but gets upset when followed up too aggressively. They know which customers need a soft reminder and which ones need nothing — because they'll pay when they're ready and nudging only creates friction.
No software knows this. HERE doesn't know it. And an automated message that gets the tone wrong — too formal, too soon, too aggressive — can damage a relationship that took three years to build.
HERE gives you the information you need to make that judgment: how much is owed, for how long, what the last interaction was. You decide whether to follow up, how, and when. That decision stays yours.
Trust is the product
When merchants forward messages to HERE, they're sharing a lot. Customer names and phone numbers. Order histories. Payment amounts. Conversations. Everything that flows through a business's WhatsApp ends up in HERE's memory.
That comes with a responsibility. The data is there to serve the merchant — to help them remember, to answer their questions, to surface what they need. It's not there to power automated outreach to third parties who haven't consented to being messaged by a software system they've never heard of.
If HERE messaged your customers, your customers would start receiving messages from a number they don't recognise, possibly at inconvenient times, about sensitive financial matters — without any context about what HERE is or why it's contacting them.
That erodes trust. Not just in HERE, but in you, because the messages would appear to come from your business.
The slippery slope is real
Once a tool starts taking autonomous actions on your behalf — sending messages, making commitments, acting as you — the boundary of what it will do becomes unclear. If HERE can message a customer about a payment, can it also respond to a customer's question? Can it negotiate? Can it make promises about delivery dates?
We're not interested in building a tool that operates autonomously in your name. HERE is a memory, not an agent. The distinction matters. A memory tells you what you need to know and lets you decide what to do. An agent acts on your behalf — and when it acts wrong, the consequences land on you.
What HERE does instead
When you want to follow up on a payment, HERE gives you everything you need to do it yourself: the amount, the date, the history, the last interaction. You take that information and send the message you want to send, in the tone you know works with that specific customer.
You can also ask HERE to remind you — "Remind me to follow up with Sharma on Friday" — and HERE will nudge you at the right time, in your timezone, 15 minutes before you'd said you wanted to think about it. That's reminder for the merchant, not message to the customer.
The intelligence is in the memory. The action stays with you.
A line we'll hold
We know this is a feature some users want. We've been asked for it repeatedly since the pilot started. We're not ruling it out forever — there are probably controlled versions of customer-facing communication that could be built responsibly, with explicit opt-in from both merchant and customer, with the merchant reviewing every message before it sends.
But the default, for now and for the foreseeable future, is clear: HERE messages you. Only you. Your customers are yours.
A tool that knows your business should make you better at running it — not run it for you.
If that's the kind of tool you're looking for, we're in private pilot now. Six months free for the first five merchants who join.