Overview & Getting Started

Roast is a feedback collection tool built around a single embeddable widget that captures the full spectrum of user sentiment. Unlike testimonial tools that only collect happy customers, the widget offers two distinct modes from the same button.

Praise Mode collects positive feedback and testimonials, optionally with a 1-5 star rating and a video, which you can publish to a public Wall of Love. Roast Mode collects critical feedback gamified with a 'Heat Slider', so users grade how strongly they feel from lukewarm through to nuclear.

Every piece of feedback a visitor leaves is called a submission. Submissions can be plain text, a video recording, or a screen recording, and each one is tagged as either a praise or a roast. They arrive in your dashboard for review before anything is published anywhere.

The difference is the type recorded on each submission, set by the visitor when they choose a mode in the widget. Praise submissions can carry a star rating (1-5) and a marketing-consent flag; roast submissions carry a heat level.

This type drives what you can do with a submission once it's in the dashboard. Only praise submissions can be added to the Wall of Love, and that option only appears when the visitor gave marketing consent. Only roast submissions show the 'Create Issue' action, which pushes the feedback to a connected issue tracker.

Roast follows a three-stage flow. First you collect: the widget is embedded on your site and visitors leave praise or roasts, which are saved with a status of 'pending'. Submissions arrive without you needing to log in, and any connected integrations (Slack, Discord, webhooks, issue trackers) are notified automatically when a new one is created.

Next you moderate: every submission starts as 'pending' in your inbox. From there a team member can approve it, reject it, or flag it for attention. Nothing is public until you act on it.

Finally you publish or act on it: approved praise (with consent) can be added to your public Wall of Love, and roasts can be turned into issues in your tracker or analysed with AI to extract tags, a summary and a sentiment score. Submissions can also be permanently deleted to satisfy GDPR deletion requests, which also removes any stored video.

After signing in you land on the dashboard, which has a fixed left sidebar split into two groups — 'Feedback' and 'Manage' — plus a top bar with the current page title, a theme toggle, a notifications bell and your user menu.

The Feedback group contains Inbox (your home and feedback list), Wall of Love (curate published testimonials), Analytics (trends and insights), and Embed (get the widget snippet for your site). The Manage group contains Team, Settings and Billing.

At the bottom of the sidebar a plan badge shows your current plan (Spark, Flame or Inferno), your submission usage against the plan limit, and an upgrade prompt if you're not already on the top plan. The Inbox item shows a count badge of total submissions across your widgets.

The Inbox is the dashboard home (titled 'Feedback Inbox'). At the top, four stat cards summarise your workspace: Total Feedback, Praise, Roasts and Pending Review. The praise/roast/total cards also show a 30-day trend compared with the previous 30 days.

Below the stats are controls: a type filter (All / Praise / Roasts), a status dropdown (All Status / Pending / Approved / Rejected), and a search box that matches across feedback text, author names and AI tags. If recent roasts share a common AI tag, an 'AI Insight' banner appears highlighting the pattern with a one-click filter.

The main area is a paginated list of submission cards (20 per page). Each card shows the feedback type icon (a heat emoji for roasts, a heart for praise), media and status badges, a content preview, any AI summary, sentiment and tags, the page it came from, and the author. Clicking a card opens its detail page; the three-dot button expands quick actions inline.

Roast access is gated: visiting any /dashboard page requires you to be signed in, otherwise you're redirected to the login page. The public marketing site currently runs a waitlist rather than open self-serve signup (the signup route redirects to the waitlist).

When a brand-new owner signs in for the first time, Roast automatically creates a starter widget called 'My First Widget' (accepting feedback from any domain) so you have something to embed immediately. Users who arrive via a team invitation are not given a starter widget — they join the inviting owner's workspace instead.

From there the typical first steps are: go to Embed to copy the widget snippet onto your site, wait for submissions to arrive in the Inbox, moderate them, and then build out your Wall of Love and connect any integrations you need.

A workspace is all the data owned by one account (the owner). An owner can invite team members, who then act inside the owner's workspace under a role. There are four roles: owner, admin, editor and viewer.

Owners can do everything, including billing and managing team roles. Admins can moderate submissions, manage the Wall, manage forms and integrations, invite members and read the team, but cannot access billing or change/remove members. Editors can moderate submissions, manage the Wall, reply and run AI analysis, but cannot change forms, integrations, team or billing. Viewers are read-only everywhere and cannot even run AI analysis.

These permissions are enforced on the server: actions like changing a submission's status, deleting a submission, creating forms or running analysis check the caller's role and return a 'Forbidden' error if the role lacks the right capability.