We audited our own website and found twenty three wrong claims

Nobody made us do this. We checked every claim on the site against the code that ships, and the site lost.

A marketing site drifts. Someone writes a feature into a headline while it is still being built. A plan changes and the pricing page does not. A legal document gets copied from a template that describes a company slightly unlike yours. None of it feels like lying while it is happening, which is exactly the problem.

So we took every factual claim on svarloop.s8n.in and tried to trace it to the code that actually ships. Twenty three of them could not be traced, and a few earlier ones had already been caught the same way. Here are the ones worth learning from.

The one that would have done real damage

The site said calls are checked against the National Do Not Call registry before every dial. They are not.

The suppression list ships empty, so the check ran and passed on every number. Worse, the function's own docstring says not to present this as DND compliant to a user until real data is bundled. We had written the warning to ourselves and then put the opposite on the homepage.

That is a claim about a TRAI obligation, made to Indian agencies who would reasonably have relied on it. It was removed everywhere it appeared, and every page now says plainly that the national registry is not bundled and checking it remains the customer's responsibility.

The part I did not expect: what replaced it reads better. A calling window of nine in the morning to nine at night. No more than three attempts to any number in a day. A do not contact list the owner builds. Opt outs detected from what the person actually said on the call, and pushed to Sarvam so a campaign already queued cannot reach them. All of that is real, all of it is enforced, and it was sitting unmentioned underneath a claim that was not.

A privacy policy that contradicted itself three paragraphs apart

It said lead data is never transmitted to Sarvam under any circumstance. Then, further down the same page, it correctly explained that it is.

Both sentences were written in good faith at different times. Only one could survive. The policy now names the exact seven fields that go out when a campaign is built, because the real answer is defensible and the absolute one never was.

A cancellation control that did not exist

The terms and the refund policy described a Pro subscription that renews automatically, and told people they could cancel it from Settings. There is no automatic renewal in the payment handler and there is no such control in the app. Pro is a one year licence that simply ends.

Telling a customer where to find a cancel button that is not there is the kind of error that turns into a chargeback and a very bad review, and it had been live for weeks.

A paid feature that did not exist, inside a refund window

Pro was sold on AI call insights, metered through our proxy. The refund policy even carved out metered AI usage as non refundable. There is no such proxy anywhere in the codebase.

Again the truth was stronger. Insights run on a model Svarloop installs on the customer's own machine on first run. No key, no meter, no third bill, and transcripts never leave the PC to be summarised by anyone. Both tiers get it. What Pro actually buys is priority support and rolling updates, so that is what the page says now.

Tax we were not registered to collect

Four places on the site said prices include GST, and the FAQ promised a GST compliant invoice generated automatically. S8N is not GST registered. It cannot add GST and the payment gateway cannot issue a GST invoice on its behalf.

These were statements about the seller's tax status rather than marketing copy, so they came out entirely rather than being softened. The FAQ now says plainly that no GST is added and that the receipt is not a GST invoice, because an agency buyer will ask exactly this in order to claim input credit, and finding out after paying is far worse than reading it beforehand.

A company that does not exist

The legal pages named "Stellar Eight Networks". S8N has no expansion. Somebody, quite possibly an AI asked to make the branding sound more corporate, invented one, and it ended up inside a licence agreement.

A licence that names an entity which does not exist is not a small typo. It is removed throughout, and the pages now name S8N AI Services.

And the ordinary drift

The rest were smaller and duller and there were a lot of them. Only one lead source ships, not the three that were listed. There is no overnight scheduler. Leads outside the calling window are skipped, not queued for later, which is a meaningful difference if you built a plan around it. There is no daily cap and no Lead Sources screen. Urdu was listed and is not supported. The language count was wrong in five different places, against an actual answer of ten Indic languages plus English. The changelog claimed nothing had shipped while the site was serving version 0.1.4. The licence agreement denied that the free tier exists. And WhatsApp was being sold as unlocked after payment without mentioning anywhere that it needs the customer's own Meta business account.

What we changed about how we work

The fix is not to be more careful. Everyone intends to be careful. The fix is that a number on the site now has to come from somewhere you can open.

Every figure in the WhatsApp documentation, for example, is read out of the application rather than written from memory. The twenty four hour service window and the cap of two messages per number per day are the constants in the compliance module. The credential fields listed are the ones the setup screen actually asks for. If the code changes and the doc does not, that is now a visible mismatch between two files rather than a private difference between the software and somebody's recollection of it.

The site is also smaller than it was. Several sections were deleted rather than corrected, because the honest version of the claim was not interesting enough to keep.

Why publish this

Because the alternative is quietly editing the pages and hoping nobody diffs them, and because the pattern is not unique to us. If you are shipping a product with a marketing site, the claim most likely to be wrong is the one you are proudest of, written while the feature was still three weeks out.

Four things still carry no room for drift: what leaves the customer's machine, what compliance is actually enforced, what a plan includes, and who the seller legally is. Those are worth checking against the code on a schedule rather than when somebody complains.

One gap from the audit is still open, and it belongs to us rather than to the software: the Grievance Officer section of the privacy policy names a contact address but no person. That is on the list.

More notes from building this are on the blog, including a compliance bug we shipped and what an AI voice call actually costs.