How it works

The mechanism, with the numbers left in.

The home page makes the claims. This is where each one is cashed: one thread walked message by message, every gate an inbound email passes with its real constant, what the numbers can and cannot tell you yet, and what Decize refuses to build.

One thread, start to finish

What an email thread turns into.

Four messages in a thread nobody treated as special. On the left is what people actually sent. On the right is what the record did about it — including the message that decided nothing.

  1. 01 · in your inbox · 12 Feb · 09:14

    priya@acme.com

    data residency — Helsinki can’t sign

    The Helsinki team can’t sign until records sit in the EU. Renewal is 30 June, so if we’re moving we decide this month.

    new_decisionconfidence 0.84

    Opens a record and drafts it from the message.

    • Title · “Move our customer data region from US to EU”
    • Owner · Priya R. — resolved from the sending address
    • Deadline · 30 Jun · Status · Pending
    • Reversibility · one-way door (AI read, correctable in one tap)

    Replies once into the thread: logged, with the title, owner and date it read.

  2. 02 · in your inbox · 12 Feb · 09:31

    dev@acme.com

    Re: data residency — Helsinki can’t sign

    Sounds good — adding it to Thursday’s agenda.

    noneconfidence 0.22 · below the 0.6 floor

    Logged against the thread and dropped. No record changes.

    • Nothing written to the ledger — this message decided nothing

    Stays silent. Decize only speaks when something actually changed.

  3. 03 · in your inbox · 14 Feb · 16:02

    marc@acme.com

    Re: data residency — Helsinki can’t sign

    Migrating now is the call. I’ll sign off — but dry-run the export first, I don’t trust the two-hour estimate.

    updates_existingpatches the record this thread already opened

    Updates the same record instead of creating a second one.

    • Summary · rewritten to the agreed course
    • Assumption · “export fits one maintenance window” · falsified if a dry run runs over 4h
    • Sign-off · requested from Marc L.

    Already replied to this thread inside 24h, so it stays quiet.

  4. 04 · in your inbox · 3 Mar · 11:47

    priya@acme.com

    Re: data residency — Helsinki can’t sign

    Dry run took five hours. We’re not making the June window — reopening this.

    updates_existingchangeKind · reversed

    Flips the record back to Pending. The reversal is recorded as a reversal.

    • Status · Decided → Pending
    • The reason a decision changed is what the analytics later count
    • The original frame stays locked — it is not rewritten

    Replies: reopened.

Nobody in that thread opened Decize. The outcome arrives the same way: when the decision is due, the owner gets an email whose buttons record how it went in one tap. What you are left with is the record — the thread stays in your mail client, and Decize keeps a copy of each captured message alongside the decision it produced.

Spam, abuse, and your data

An open inbox is a liability. This one isn’t open.

Handing a product your email is the moment you should get suspicious. So here is the whole mechanism: what it takes to get a message in, what happens to it, and what Decize will and won’t do with it.

What a message passes through, in order

Every gate below is enforced in code today. The numbers are the real constants.

  1. Signature

    Verified against a signing secret over the exact bytes received, before anything is parsed.

    reject unsigned
  2. Address token

    The capture address carries a secret token. Retired tokens work for a grace period, then stop.

    8 characters
  3. Sender

    Already on your roster? Accepted. Everyone else — including someone whose domain you allowlisted — is refused and reported to the owner.

    default deny
  4. New senders

    A domain match queues a first-time sender for approval. It never admits them — an owner adds them with one tap, and nobody joins your roster without it.

    owner tap
  5. Machine mail

    Auto-replies, out-of-office autoresponders, bounces and Decize’s own replies are dropped before triage.

    no loops
  6. Volume

    A hard ceiling on how many messages one workspace will accept in a day.

    200 / day
  7. Is it even a decision?

    Below the confidence floor, or structurally unusable, nothing is written at all. Precision over recall.

    0.6 floor
  8. Scope of a reply

    A reply can only patch the decision its own thread opened — it cannot be steered at another record.

    same thread
  9. Decize talking back

    Silence is the default: only on a real change, at most once per thread per day, and the owner can switch it off.

    20 / day

Your organization is the boundary

Threads and messages are scoped to one organization inside Postgres, not by application filtering, so the rule holds for a direct API call too. No client can insert or edit them — captured mail is written server-side only. Every active member of that workspace can read it; nobody outside it can.

What Decize actually keeps

The cleaned message and the original text, stored against the decision that message produced — so months later you can see what was really said, not just the summary. Each message is keyed by its own Message-ID, so a provider retry or a second forward of the same mail cannot create a duplicate decision.

Links in our emails are bound, not guessable

The one-tap buttons we send — record an outcome, add a sender, adjust a setting — carry a signature bound to one organization, one action and one person, and it is verified before anything is written. Forwarding the mail does not hand your workspace to whoever receives it.

You can shut the door

Rotate the capture address and the old one stops working after its grace period. Remove someone from the roster and their mail stops being accepted — their next message does not quietly reinstate them. Turn off replies and Decize never writes into a thread again. None of that needs us.

Two things we will not dress up. Decision text — including the captured message — is sent to an AI provider (Anthropic, with Google as a fallback) to be read and summarised; that is how the drafting works, and our privacy policy names the providers. And inside a workspace there are no private messages: every active member can read the ledger and the captured mail behind it. What is fenced is the organization, not the individual.

Decize also can’t be turned into a spam cannon on your behalf: it replies only when something changed, never more than once a day per thread, never more than twenty times a day for a whole workspace, and an owner can silence it completely.

What accumulates

Some of this works on day one. Some of it takes months.

Every row below says what it needs before it means anything. A number that would identify one person is withheld rather than shown.

  • Decisions per week, outcome distribution, one-way against two-way doors

    raw counts — useful from week one

  • Median days from capture to decided

    from your first decided call

  • Why decisions changed — planned revisit, new information, an assumption that did not hold

    needs after-action reviews

  • Recurring themes across recent decisions, written from your own ledger

    needs a handful of decisions

  • Loop health: outcome closure, on-time execution, owner coverage

    each rate stays blank below five

  • Forecast calibration — Brier score, skill against the base rate, a reliability plot

    needs five resolved forecasts; this one takes months, and it is the most honest number in the product

  • Outcome-closure run chart with shift and trend signals

    needs about ten weeks of steady capture

  • Full ledger and activity log as CSV, and a system-health card telling you whether the automation itself is still running

    available from day one

What Decize refuses to do

There is no surveillance layer in here.

A decision ledger is one bad product decision away from becoming an employee-monitoring tool. These are the refusals that keep it from becoming one.

  1. No per-person scores, ever.

    No leaderboard, no individual quality score, no “who hasn’t logged anything” list, no manager drill-down into one person’s record. The per-member analytics screen was deleted, not hidden.

  2. Rates stay blank until they are anonymous.

    Any rate that could be traced back to one individual is withheld below five data points. The dashboard shows a dash instead of a number, on purpose.

  3. The dashboard cannot read your decisions.

    Every number, chart and digest is computed from a database view that has no title column, no summary column and no message body — so a reporting bug cannot leak decision text into a chart.

  4. Isolation is enforced by the database.

    Row-level security scopes every read and write to organizations you are an active member of. It runs inside Postgres rather than as application filtering, so it holds for a direct API call too.

  5. The AI is labelled, never authoritative.

    Every generated read is captioned as Decize’s read and not a source of truth. A value alignment stays an estimate until a person confirms it, and a confidence the model inferred from a message does not count toward calibration until a human owns it.

  6. Leadership gets the aggregate, and the email says so.

    The weekly rollup to owners and managers carries organization-level counts and minimum-sample rates only, and prints that promise inside the message.

One thing to be straight about: inside a workspace there are no private decisions. Every active member can read the whole ledger, including the original message text, and the full member roster. Decize is shared organizational memory — what it refuses to build is a reporting layer pointed at individuals.

Three roles: members capture and read the ledger; managers also get the dashboard, analytics, the roster and workspace settings; owners hold role changes and the workspace itself.

Where Decize is today

Early, and specific about it.

Email capture

Live — your workspace’s own capture address is in its settings — and new. We are bringing the first workspaces on by hand.

Time to value

Counts, queues and the attention list are useful from your first decision. Forecast calibration needs five resolved forecasts. The run chart wants a few months of steady capture. We would rather say that here than have you find out in week two.

Certifications

We have not been audited. No SOC 2, no penetration test, no bug bounty. Our security page says plainly what we do and do not do.

Customers

None to name yet. There are no logos on this site because inventing them would undermine the one thing this product is for.

Read what we do and do not do →

Start the ledger with one decision.