Bakeries, gyms, dentists, hair salons - they all face the same problem. Ten to fifteen customer questions a day, and nobody there to answer after 6 PM.
The gap Pava kept seeing wasn't a technology problem. It was a timing problem. Small business owners - running everything themselves or with a tiny team - would lose customers not because they gave bad answers, but because they gave no answer. A question about availability sent on a Saturday night would go unanswered until Monday. By then, the customer had already booked somewhere else.
The tools available didn't fit. Enterprise chatbot platforms wanted hundreds of dollars a month and a sales call. Free alternatives were keyword matchers - type "hours" and get a canned response, say anything else and they break. Neither option was built for a bakery owner who just wants to stop losing customers at midnight.
Trained on the Business, Not the Internet
AskFred is built around one principle: the knowledge base should come from the business itself, not generic training data. The setup process takes about five minutes. Owners feed it their FAQs - hours, pricing, services, policies - and the assistant learns from those. When a customer asks a question, the answer reflects what that specific business actually does, not what a language model assumes it might do.
The assistant handles inquiries across websites, Instagram DMs, and Facebook messages, and responds in over 30 languages. For a local business with international customers or a diverse neighbourhood, that breadth matters.
The typical AskFred user is a solo operator or small team where the owner is effectively the support department. AskFred gives them coverage they could not otherwise afford - answering at midnight, on weekends, between tasks - for $39 a month.
AskFred is available at askfredai.com.
