Common issues and how to fix them

The most common support questions, with the self-serve fix for each. If the fix below does not resolve the issue, click the floating "?" button in the bottom-right of any page inside the app to open a ticket, or email justin@fedgrade.com.

My Brief didn't arrive

Briefs are generated by a job that runs once a day, starting at 11:18 UTC. There is no per-workspace generation time and no timezone setting for it. If nothing has appeared well after that, walk this checklist:

1. Check /today first. On the Free plan the Brief is in the app only — it is generated for you but never emailed, so an empty inbox is expected and /today is where it lives. Pro and above also receive it by email.
2. Check your notification settings. /settings/notifications controls which notification emails you receive and how often (real-time, hourly, daily or off). The Brief is generated regardless, so check /today directly.
3. Check your tier. Free shows the top 3 items only — if the Brief looks short, that is by design. Pro and above show up to 10.
4. Check the validation badge. If the sources for your persona could not support a Brief that day, it is delivered in an honest "insufficient evidence" state rather than with unsupported claims.

On Pro and above you can also re-synthesize on demand with the variant dropdown on /today. That is an AI generation, so it is not available on Free.

If none of the above explains it, open a ticket with the date and your workspace name.

Search returns nothing

Search runs over the indexed federal research library. Empty results almost always come from one of these causes:

1. Filters too narrow. Clear the agency, source, signal, date-range, confidence and vendor filters one at a time. If results appear when one filter is dropped, that filter was over-restrictive.
2. Query too specific. A long query with several quoted phrases will often return nothing. Remove the quotes around the most specific phrase and search again.
3. Not in the library yet. Coverage tracks the sources that have been ingested. A miss can mean "not in the research library yet" rather than "doesn't exist".

Webhook deliveries are failing

Open /settings/webhooks and click Deliveries on the endpoint to see each attempt with its response code and the first part of the response body. The two most common causes:

1. Signing secret rotated, receiver not updated. For 24 hours after a rotation every delivery is signed with both the new and the previous secret, so receivers have time to switch. If failures started about a day after a rotation, update the secret in your receiver and click Replay on the failed deliveries.
2. Your endpoint returns an error for valid payloads. Any non-2xx response — including 4xx — counts as a failure and is retried on the schedule in Webhooks. Check your endpoint's logs, and make sure it accepts application/json and the envelope described there.

After 10 consecutive failed deliveries (a running counter — no time window) the endpoint is disabled automatically. Re-enable it from /settings/webhooks with Enable.

API 429 rate limit

429 responses include a Retry-After header in seconds. Rate limits are per API key, per minute, and per route budget — the same on Enterprise and Government, with no daily cap:

• 60 requests/minute shared across GET /api/v1/search, /notices, /opportunities, /forecasts, /entities/{id} and /agencies/{slug}
• 10 requests/minute for GET /api/v1/briefs
• 30 requests/minute for POST /api/v1/pwin

Every v1 response carries X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Reset, so you can pace requests before you hit the limit. Use one key per integration, respect Retry-After, and back off; do not retry faster than the header suggests. /settings/api-keys shows each key's requests per endpoint over the last 24 hours, plus 7-, 30- and 90-day usage. See API keys.

Still stuck

Open a ticket with the floating "?" button inside the app, or email justin@fedgrade.com. Pick the Data concern category if a citation or source looks wrong, or use Report inaccuracy on the Brief itself.