FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Answers to the questions we hear most. Still stuck? Use the feedback button — we read everything.

Getting started

  • What is Roadmark, and how is it different from Notion or a Gantt chart?

    Roadmark is a roadmap tool built around the one thing static docs never capture: how and why your plan changed. You fork your roadmap at any milestone like a git branch — the path you took and the one you abandoned both stay on the canvas, each pivot carrying a required decision log. No doc, spreadsheet, or Gantt chart gives you that history.

  • Do I have to start from a blank board?

    No — you can start from a template. The Templates gallery has curated roadmaps (SaaS pre-seed→Series A, go-to-market, hardware, open source) built around the decision-log format. Preview one, click Use this template, and it forks into a fresh private board you own — including an example pivot with its reasoning — for you to reshape. You can also import an existing roadmap from another tool, or duplicate one of your own boards.

  • Do I need to install anything?

    No. Roadmark runs in your browser — sign up and you’re on a board in under a minute. There’s nothing to download.

  • Is there a mobile app, a public API, or other languages?

    Not today, on all three. The board is responsive and works in a phone browser, but there’s no native iOS or Android app; there’s no public API to build against yet (imports run through the integrations we ship, not through one you write); and the interface is English only. If one of these is a blocker for you, email us about it — it’s the clearest signal we get about what to build next.

  • How do I sign in — can I use GitHub, Google or Microsoft?

    Your choice: an email and password, or one click with GitHub, Google, GitLab, LinkedIn or Microsoft. Signing in with a provider only shares your name and email — it does not give Roadmark access to your repositories, or anything else in that account. (Connecting a tool to import a roadmap is a separate, explicit step with its own read-only permission.) Use the same email across methods and it stays one account — no duplicates — and you can add a password to a social account any time from your settings.

  • Is it really free — and is there a trial?

    The Free plan is genuinely free, for good: create up to three roadmaps, import from any supported tool, share public read-only links with anyone, draft milestones with your own AI key, and export to PNG, SVG, PDF and PowerPoint. Inviting named collaborators onto a board, posting comments on milestones, and capturing roadmap releases are paid features (Pro/Team) — on a Free board you can still read the discussion and any releases, and public link sharing always stays free. Sign up free and your first 14 days also include full Pro (no card); when the trial ends you move to Free with all your roadmaps kept — you just can’t add more until you upgrade. Upgrading to Pro mid-trial doesn’t cost you the days you haven’t used: your first Pro payment lands when the trial would have ended, not the moment you subscribe. Team has no trial of its own, so choosing Team starts billing right away. See the pricing page for what Pro and Team include.

  • How does billing work — and can I get a refund?

    Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly (yearly = 2 months free) through our merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy — they handle the card, invoices and VAT/sales tax, and we never see your card number. Listed prices exclude tax — any VAT or sales tax your country charges is added at checkout. Cancel anytime from Account → Plan → Manage subscription: you keep access until the end of the period you paid for, then move to Free with everything you made intact — nothing is ever deleted on downgrade. Switching plans — Pro to Team, or monthly to yearly — works differently from cancelling: it takes effect immediately and the difference is prorated, so going up charges only the rest of the current period at the new price and going down leaves a credit towards your next invoice. Not what you expected? Email support within 14 days of your first payment for a full refund — that window is about the payment, separate from the free trial that happens to be the same length — and an accidental renewal is refunded if you ask within 30 days of the charge.

Privacy & your data

  • Who can see my boards?

    Private by default — only you and the people you explicitly invite (as owner, editor, or viewer). A board becomes visible to anyone else only if you flip it public, and even then it’s strictly read-only. A public board can also be embedded on your own site or docs as a live read-only iframe — either the board itself or its decision feed (Share → “Embed on your site”). Your internal honesty signals — the ⚠ at-risk and confidence markers — are hidden from visitors unless you switch them on, and so are your captured release tags. On Pro you can lock that public link with a password or set it to expire, so “public” can still mean “only the people I gave the link and password to, until a date I choose”.

  • If I share a board publicly, do you track who views it?

    On the Team plan you get a Views panel for each board: how many times your public link was opened, unique vs returning visitors, time spent, and where visits came from (referring site, device type, country). It’s deliberately coarse and anonymous — we don’t store IP addresses, names, or emails, and your own visits aren’t counted. We keep a single random, non-identifying id in the visitor’s browser to tell unique from returning, and we record nothing at all if their browser signals “Do Not Track” or they decline the cookie notice shown on public board pages. Views of an embedded board are counted without storing anything in the visitor’s browser at all — each embed view simply counts as a new visitor. Like the Activity log, the Views panel is a Team feature and is visible to the board’s owner only.

  • Can visitors react to or vote on my roadmap?

    Optionally, yes — and it stays a demand signal, not a feature-request board. Flip Share → “Let visitors react to milestones” (off by default) and anyone viewing your public link can tap “👍 I’m waiting for this” on a milestone; the count shows on each one so you can see what your audience wants most. Visitors react to the roadmap you set — they can’t add items to it. Voting is anonymous: no login, and we keep only a random, non-identifying first-party id in the browser to remember a vote and not double-count it (no name, email, or IP) — a functional token for the action taken, separate from the passive view analytics (which do honour “Do Not Track” and the cookie-notice decline). A visitor can also optionally leave their email to be notified when a milestone ships, its date changes, or it’s dropped from the plan (or comes back) — but only after they confirm via a link we email them (double opt-in, so no one can be signed up by someone else). That address is stored only to send those notices (one email per event, one-click unsubscribe, nothing else) and is never shown publicly. You can turn the whole thing off any time; members always interact through the board itself. On the Team plan the board owner gets a Demand panel — most-wanted milestones, subscriber count, and a CSV export of that audience.

  • Do you sell my data or use it to train AI?

    No. We don’t sell your data and we don’t train any model on it. AI generation only sends the prompt you choose to generate, and only to the provider whose key you supplied.

  • Can I export or delete everything?

    Yes, on both counts. You can download your account data and permanently delete your account and its boards yourself from settings — no support ticket required. If you're on a paid plan, deleting your account also cancels the subscription, so there are no further charges. Any single board can also be downloaded as a PNG, SVG, PDF or PowerPoint deck — or copied to your clipboard as an image to paste straight into Slack, Notion or an email — from the export menu under the zoom controls.

  • Are my keys and tokens encrypted?

    Yes. Everything sensitive you connect is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and is never logged or stored in plaintext — both your AI provider keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and the credentials that link your import sources, whether an OAuth token or a personal access token you paste for a self-hosted tool. Once saved, you can replace a key or token but never view it again — only the app reads it, behind the scenes, to reach the provider.

  • Can I change my email or password?

    Yes — both from your account settings. Changing your email sends a confirmation link to the new address before it takes effect (so a typo can’t lock you out); changing your password takes effect right away and emails your account a heads-up.

Building your roadmap

  • How do I add or edit milestones?

    On a board you own or can edit, add a milestone right on the canvas — give it a title, an optional description, a target date, a status (completed / active / upcoming / skipped), and an optional confidence. Editing or removing one works the same way, and changes save as you go.

  • What are milestone confidence and date history?

    Two honesty signals, both free. On any milestone you can set a confidence — low, medium, or high — for how likely it is to land on its target date; it shows as a small badge right on the roadmap. And whenever a milestone’s target date moves, Roadmark records it as a date history (for example “Mar 1 → Apr 15, slipped 45 days”), so anyone viewing the board can see how the plan has actually shifted rather than just where it landed. The history is visible to everyone who can see the board and can’t be edited or erased.

  • Can I rename my board or change its description?

    Yes. Owners and editors can rename the board and rewrite its description any time from the board’s edit view — including on a board you imported. The description is required, so a board always says what it’s for.

  • How do I make a pivot (fork a branch)?

    Pick the milestone where your plan changed and fork a new branch from it. Roadmark asks for a decision log — a short note (at least 20 characters) on why you changed course. It’s required on every branch except the main one, so the reasoning behind a pivot is never lost. The new branch shares the history up to the fork point, then tells its own story.

  • Why won’t it let me add a milestone to a branch — or pick an early date?

    Two guardrails keep the timeline unambiguous. Once a branch has another branch forked off it, that branch is “closed” at the fork — new work goes on the child branch instead, not the parent. And a milestone on a forked branch must be dated on or after the point where it split off, since a pivot can’t contain work that predates the pivot.

  • What happens when I delete a milestone or a branch?

    Deleting a milestone removes just that milestone — unless a branch was forked from it, in which case you delete that branch first (the milestone is its anchor). Deleting a branch permanently removes the branch and every milestone on it; if it has its own child branches, delete those first. The main branch can’t be deleted, and none of this touches the history on other branches.

  • What happens when I delete a board?

    Deleting a board is permanent and immediate — it removes the board, all of its branches and milestones, and every member’s access at once. Only the board’s owner can do it, and it can’t be undone, so make sure before you confirm.

  • Can I capture a version of my roadmap and see what changed?

    Yes — from the board editor’s toolbar, tag the whole board’s state under a label like “Series A — Mar 2026”. That release is frozen and never changes, so later you can compare it against where the roadmap is now and see exactly what shipped, what slipped, and what was added or dropped — the “what we promised vs. where we are” you’d send an investor. You can even hit “Draft investor update” to turn that diff into a short, founder-voiced summary (on your own AI key) — then edit it and email it to your investors right from Roadmark, with a confirm step before it goes. Each recipient gets it privately and replies land in your own inbox, not ours. Capturing releases is part of the paid plans (the board needs an owner on Pro or Team); everyone on the board, viewers included, can read and diff the ones already captured. Releases stay private to the board unless you turn on “Show release tags on the decision feed” in Share — and even then visitors see only each release’s name and date, never its frozen contents or the diff.

  • Is there an audit log of who changed what?

    Yes — on Team, every board has an Activity log: an append-only record of who changed what and when — milestone edits, branch status changes, visibility flips, member invites / role changes / removals, and release captures. You can filter it by type or date and search by name, person, or role. It’s the decision-evidence trail for a data room. The history is recorded for every board all along, so the moment you’re on Team it’s there in full — and it’s visible to the board’s owner only.

Importing a roadmap

  • Which tools can I import from?

    GitHub Projects, GitLab, Linear, Jira, Shortcut, YouTrack, Azure DevOps, Asana, Notion, and monday.com — plus a CSV upload for anything else. One “Import roadmap” button opens a picker of everything you’ve connected. Notion databases and monday boards are freeform, so you map which column is the title, date and status before importing.

  • Will importing change anything in my source tool?

    Never. Every import is a one-way, read-only snapshot — we read your project once and build a Roadmark board from it. Your source tool is never written to, and nothing there changes.

  • What exactly gets imported?

    Your milestones: their titles, descriptions, target dates, and a status mapped to Roadmark’s four states. Imports are intentionally flat — branches and forks are a Roadmark-native layer you add on top, so we never invent pivots that weren’t in your source.

  • Does an import stay in sync with the source?

    Yes, if you want it to — your Roadmark edits never flow back to the source, but pulling from the source works two ways. The editor’s toolbar has a Sync button on every imported board (except CSV uploads, which have no live source to ask), and next to it an Auto-sync toggle that pulls the latest once a day on its own, using the connection of whoever switched it on. If that connection later expires, auto-sync turns itself off and the board tells you to reconnect — so it never sits “on” while quietly failing every night.

  • How do I refresh an imported board with newer changes?

    Press Sync in the board editor’s toolbar. It pulls a fresh snapshot from the source and applies only the differences — your work is never overwritten: milestones you edited keep your version, your own milestones and forked branches with their decision logs aren’t touched at all. Items that vanished from the source are removed only if you never touched them; anything you edited or forked from stays and wears a small “removed from source” chip on the canvas instead. After each sync a short summary shows exactly what changed. (And with Auto-sync on, the same refresh runs once a day by itself.)

  • I edited an imported milestone — can I pull the original back from the source?

    Yes. Normally, once you edit an imported milestone, Sync leaves it alone so your change is never lost — which also means a later change in the source won’t reach that milestone. If you want to undo that on a single milestone, open it in the editor and choose Reset to source (the button is labelled with your provider — e.g. “Reset to Linear”). That one milestone discards your edits and takes the source’s current values, then tracks the source again on the next Sync. Its comments and its place on the board stay, and nothing else on the board is touched.

  • What permissions do you ask for?

    Read-only scopes, nothing more — just enough to list your projects and read their milestones. For self-hosted GitLab, YouTrack, or Azure DevOps you paste a personal access token and your instance URL; nothing is ever written back. (Whichever way you connect, the token is encrypted — see “Are my keys and tokens encrypted?” above.)

  • How are imported statuses decided?

    Every tool models “done” differently, so on import we map each source’s states onto Roadmark’s four: completed, active, upcoming, and skipped.

    One rule then runs across every board at display time: an upcoming milestone whose target date has already passed is shown as active (overdue) — so a plan that slipped never silently looks on-track. A milestone with a completion date always shows completed, and a stored completed or skipped status is always kept.

    • GitHub ProjectsFrom your status field — done / closed / shipped / merged → completed; in progress / active / in review / wip → active; anything else or blank → upcoming. Date from your target / due / iteration field.
    • GitLabProject milestones — closed → completed; open and past its due date → active; otherwise upcoming. Date from the due date.
    • Linear (initiative)Project state — completed → completed; started / paused → active; canceled → skipped; backlog / planned → upcoming. Date from the target date.
    • Linear (project)Project milestones carry no state in Linear, so it is derived from the target date — past → completed, future → upcoming.
    • JiraRelease versions — released → completed; archived but unreleased → skipped; unreleased and past its release date → active; otherwise upcoming. Date from the release date.
    • ShortcutThe objective's epics — archived → skipped; epic done → completed; in progress → active; to do → upcoming. Date from the deadline.
    • YouTrackAgile board sprints — archived → skipped; otherwise derived from the finish date (past → completed, future → upcoming).
    • Azure DevOpsProject iterations — derived from the finish date (past → completed, future → upcoming).
    • AsanaThe project’s milestone tasks — completed → completed; open and past its due date → active; otherwise upcoming. Date from the due date. Asana’s Milestone task type needs a paid Asana plan, so a project without one imports its tasks that have a due date instead, read the same way.
    • NotionYou map which property is the title, date and status yourself, since a Notion database is freeform. Status option labels are read like the others — done / shipped → completed; in progress / started → active; cancelled / archived → skipped; “Not started” / to-do / anything blank → upcoming.
    • monday.comYou map which column is the title, date and status yourself, since a monday board is freeform (the item name is offered as the default title, and a timeline column uses its end date). Status labels are read like the others — done → completed; working on it / stuck / in progress → active; cancelled / archived → skipped; anything blank → upcoming.
    • CSVYou map the status column yourself in the browser; values we don’t recognize fall back to upcoming.

    Whichever way it’s read on import, you can edit any milestone’s status afterward — the import is just a starting point.

Sharing & collaboration

  • Can I make a board public and read-only?

    Yes — one toggle gives you a link customers or investors can open without an account, with no edit access. Flip it back to private any time. On Pro you can also password-protect that link or set it to expire on a date — so you can share a roadmap like a data room and revoke access when you’re done (members of the board always get straight in, no password needed). And when a live link doesn’t fit — a slide deck, an email, an attachment — download the board as a PNG, SVG or PDF instead, or as a PowerPoint deck whose milestone tables you can still edit.

  • Can I share the story behind my roadmap, not just the plan?

    Yes — every public board has a Decision feed: a chronological page of every pivot and the reasoning you recorded when you forked a branch, newest first. It’s the “why the plan changed” story rather than just the current plan — copy its link from Share to send to investors, customers or your audience, and visitors also get a Decisions link right on the board. It rides the same public link as the board, so anyone can read it without an account — and it embeds into your own site or docs as a live iframe, just like the board does. Your internal honesty signals stay private: the “date moved” history only appears to visitors when you turn on “Show risk flags to visitors” in Share (board members always see it). The releases you’ve captured can join the story too — as dated markers you read the pivots against — behind their own switch, “Show release tags on the decision feed”. Both are off until you turn them on.

  • How do roles and permissions work?

    Every member of a private board has one of three roles:

    • Owner — full control: edit the roadmap, manage members and their roles, change visibility, and delete the board.
    • Editor — can build and change the roadmap (milestones, branches, the board’s name, description, and public/private toggle), but can’t manage members or delete the board.
    • Viewer — can’t change the roadmap, but can read it and follow the discussion: open any milestone on the shared board to read its comments (and post replies when the board is on a paid plan).

    Only an owner can invite people or change roles, and a board always keeps at least one owner — you can’t remove or demote the last one.

  • Can I invite my team?

    Yes — an owner invites teammates by email and picks each one’s role (new invites default to editor). If someone doesn’t have a Roadmark account yet, the invite waits for them to sign up, and it expires if it goes unused. How many named collaborators a board can have follows the owner’s plan — Free is single-user, Pro fits a small team, and Team is unlimited; public read-only link sharing is always free and never uses a seat. Reaching the limit only blocks new invites — no one is ever removed if a plan changes.

  • Can my team and I work on a board at the same time?

    Yes — boards are live. You’ll see who else is on a board, their cursor moving across the canvas, and a marker on any milestone someone is editing. Edits to different fields merge automatically; if two people change the same field at once, Roadmark asks before anything is overwritten rather than silently losing a change. Each milestone also has a comment thread, so the discussion about a decision lives next to it. Anyone on the board can read it — open a milestone on the shared board, viewers included — and comments are visible to board members only. Posting a comment is part of the paid plans (the board needs an owner on Pro or Team); on a Free board the thread stays readable but read-only. Type @ in a comment to mention a teammate — or @here to ping everyone in the thread and @board for the whole board. When a comment mentions you, the milestone shows an amber marker on the canvas so you spot the ping without opening every thread. Off the board, Roadmark emails you a once-a-day digest of new comments on the milestones you’re part of — the ones that mention you, plus replies in threads you’ve joined — and what you’ve read is synced across your devices, so a thread you opened on your laptop won’t still look unread on your phone. You can turn the digest off anytime in your account settings, or with one click from any email.

  • What happens to abandoned or forked branches?

    They stay on the canvas on purpose — the discarded path and the decision log explaining why you left it are the whole point of Roadmark, not clutter to clean up.

AI

  • How does AI roadmap generation work?

    Open the AI generator right in the board editor. On Pro and Team it runs on Roadmark’s managed AI — nothing to configure, just generate — up to a monthly quota (Pro 100, Team 500 generations) that is pooled: everyone working on a paid owner’s boards draws from that owner’s quota, so your teammates don’t need a plan (or a key) of their own. On any plan you can instead bring your own Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google key (auto-detected from the prefix), which is always free and unlimited — and it’s the fallback once a month’s managed quota is used up. Either way it’s not just for a blank start: it reads your board’s description and the milestones already on the branch you’re working in, so it can draft a fresh roadmap or extend an existing one. You review, edit, deselect, and set dates on the proposals before any of them land — a draft you shape, not a locked-in plan.

  • Do you store my key or my prompts?

    If you bring your own key it’s encrypted at rest and never logged in plaintext. With managed AI there’s no key for you to manage at all. Either way, prompts go only to the AI provider at generation time and aren’t used to train anything.