Troubleshooting — common issues and fixes

This article is the first place to look when something’s not working. Most issues fall into one of the patterns below; the ones that don’t, email support@athenaigrowth.com.

Free-site provisioning hasn’t completed

Symptom: You finished the Step 7 signup, you’re in the dashboard, but yourname.athenaigrowth.com doesn’t load yet — or it’s been a while and you got a “site is being built” message.

What’s happening today: The free-site provisioning chain is in a phased rollout. When it’s running cleanly, end-to-end provisioning takes 2–10 minutes after signup. Sometimes it takes longer — especially when the underlying Cloudflare Pages build queue is busy.

What to try:

1. Wait 10 minutes after Step 7. Most provisioning completes in under 10.
2. Refresh the dashboard. The Home tab shows your site URL and status; if it’s still “building,” the chain hasn’t completed.
3. Check your email — the deploy completion notification fires when the site is fully live.
4. If it’s been over an hour, something’s wrong. Open chat with your cofounder and say “my free site isn’t deploying.” If chat can’t help, email support@athenaigrowth.com — we can manually re-run the provisioning chain on our side.

Email-verification / magic-link not arriving

Symptom: You signed up (or asked for a password reset, or asked for a sign-in magic link), and the email never showed up.

What to try:

1. Check spam. Most missing-email reports are spam-filtered.
2. Confirm the email address matches your signup email exactly. Typos don’t get a helpful error — the email just goes to a real but wrong address.
3. Wait 60 seconds. The send is rate-limited to one per minute; if you triggered it twice within a minute, the second attempt was suppressed.
4. Check your gateway: if you’re on a corporate email with strict filtering (G Suite with advanced security, Microsoft 365 with ATP), the AthenAI sender (noreply@athenaigrowth.com) may be quarantined. Add to allow-list.
5. Try a different email. If your work email is bouncing, switch to a personal Gmail/Outlook address for now and update later.
6. Still missing? Email support@athenaigrowth.com from a different working address with the email you’re trying to verify, and we can manually verify on our side.

Tier upgrade not reflecting

Symptom: You paid through Stripe checkout for Solo / Growth / Scale, the charge went through, but your dashboard still says you’re on Free (or the previous tier).

What’s happening: Tier upgrades are driven by Stripe webhooks. There’s usually a 30-second to 2-minute delay between charge success and webhook delivery to AthenAI.

What to try:

1. Wait 5 minutes, then refresh the dashboard. Stripe webhook delivery usually settles within 5.
2. Sign out and back in. Tier is cached in your session; a fresh sign-in pulls the current tier from the database.
3. Check your audit log (Settings → Activity). If the upgrade event is logged but the dashboard still shows the old tier, that’s a UI cache issue — clear browser cache or open in an incognito window.
4. If it’s been 30 minutes and still wrong, email support@athenaigrowth.com with your Stripe charge ID (you’ll get this in the email receipt from Stripe). We can manually reconcile the tenant tier.

Chat-message rate limit hit

Symptom: You’re chatting with your AI cofounder, and you get an error like “you’ve used all your messages this period.”

What’s happening: Each tier has a rolling 30-day chat budget.

Tier	Budget
Free	50 messages / 30 days
Solo	500 messages / 30 days
Growth	2,000 messages / 30 days
Scale	Unlimited
Custom	Unlimited

The “rolling 30 days” part means it’s not a calendar-month reset. If you sent 50 messages on the 5th of last month, those slots free up on the 5th of this month — one at a time, as each old message rolls past the 30-day boundary.

What to try:

1. Wait it out. If you hit the cap on the 1st, by the 31st (about 30 days later) all your slots will have rolled over.
2. Upgrade. If you’re hitting Free’s cap mid-month consistently, you’ve outgrown Free — Solo gives you 500 messages, 10× the budget.
3. Use chat more efficiently. Long, specific questions cost the same as short ones. “Help me draft an email to a hot lead about our new pricing — formal tone, 100 words, mention the discount” is one message. “Help” is one message. Make each message count.

Audit not loading (Grow path)

Symptom: You’re on the Grow path, you submitted your URL at Step 1, and the audit page is stuck showing “Audit running…”

What’s happening: A 6-dimensional audit is computationally heavy — it crawls your site, runs Lighthouse-style scoring, runs an LLM-narrative pass, and stitches the report.

Typical timing:

Site complexity	Typical audit time
Small (under 20 pages, simple structure)	2–5 minutes
Medium (20–100 pages, mixed media)	5–15 minutes
Large or JS-heavy (single-page apps, lots of dynamic content)	15–30 minutes

What to try:

1. Wait 15 minutes before assuming it’s stuck.
2. Don’t refresh repeatedly. The audit runs asynchronously; refreshing doesn’t speed it up, and on rare occasions multiple tabs can fork the audit job.
3. If your site is JavaScript-heavy (React/Vue/Angular SPA with no SSR), the crawler may not be picking up your full content. The audit will still complete but the verdict may be less accurate. After it finishes, look at the “pages crawled” count — if it’s much smaller than your actual site, that’s a known limitation; chat with your cofounder about how to improve crawlability.
4. If it’s been 30+ minutes, the audit job may have failed silently. Email support@athenaigrowth.com with your URL and we’ll re-run it.

Brand-fork extraction failed (Grow path)

Symptom: You’re on the Grow path, your audit completed, but at the brand step you see “Brand extraction needs review” or “Operator review queued.”

What’s happening: The brand-fork chain pulled your site’s CSS, HTML, and assets but couldn’t confidently extract a brand kit (palette, typography, logo). This is the brand-extraction-failed status, and it routes to an operator review queue.

What to try:

1. Wait one business day. An operator typically reviews and clears the queue within 24 hours.
2. In chat, tell your cofounder “my brand-fork is in review” — it can give you a status check.
3. Email support with your account email if you want to expedite, especially if you’re trying to ship something on a deadline.
4. Or override: at the brand step, you can choose “Skip and generate fresh” — AthenAI will discard the failed extraction and generate a greenfield brand kit from your business profile instead.

For more on what brand-fork does and why it sometimes fails: /help/account/brand-kit/.

Workflow run failed (Solo+ tiers)

Symptom: A workflow you turned on shows a failed run in the run history.

What’s happening: Workflow runs can fail for many reasons — the underlying integration (GoHighLevel, Stripe, an SMS gateway) returned an error; the data shape didn’t match what the workflow expected; an LLM call timed out.

What to try:

1. Open the run detail (Settings → Workflows → your workflow → Run history → click the failed row). The detail view shows the error message.
2. Common errors:
   • “Contact not found” → the trigger fired with a contact ID that’s been deleted; ignore it.
   • “Integration token expired” → reconnect the integration in Settings → Integrations.
   • “Rate limited by HighLevel” → GHL’s API has rate caps; wait an hour and try again. If consistent, your account may need a higher GHL tier.
   • “LLM call failed” → transient; retry the workflow.
3. Email support if the same workflow keeps failing with the same error — that’s a workflow bug we want to know about.

Custom domain isn’t loading

Symptom: You set up a custom domain but yourbusiness.com won’t resolve, or it shows an SSL warning, or it shows a 404.

What to try:

1. DNS check: at whatsmydns.net, enter yourbusiness.com and confirm the DNS record matches what AthenAI’s Settings → Domain page told you to add. If it doesn’t propagate everywhere yet, wait — DNS can take up to 24 hours on slow registrars.
2. SSL check: if DNS is right but you see a cert warning, the SSL cert is still provisioning. This usually completes within 5–30 minutes after DNS is verified.
3. 404 check: if DNS is right and SSL is good but you see a 404, the domain is attached but no site is built behind it yet. This sometimes happens if you added the domain before your site finished provisioning. Wait, then refresh.
4. Still stuck? Email support@athenaigrowth.com with the domain name and the registrar — most stuck domains are a typo’d DNS record or a registrar with extreme TTL.

For full setup walkthrough: /help/account/custom-domain/.

Integration sync failure (GoHighLevel, Stripe, etc.)

Symptom: A workflow that depends on GoHighLevel or Stripe is failing, or your CRM data isn’t syncing, or you’re seeing “integration not connected” warnings.

What to try:

1. Settings → Integrations — find the integration that’s failing and check the connection status.
2. Reconnect: disconnect and reconnect. OAuth tokens occasionally expire on the integration’s side; a fresh connect issues a new token.
3. Check the integration’s status page: GoHighLevel and Stripe both have public status pages. If they’re degraded on their side, our workflows will fail through.
4. Email support if reconnect doesn’t fix it — sometimes there’s a token-scope mismatch we need to repair on our end.

Sign-in problems

A common subset of troubleshooting that has its own page: /help/troubleshooting/sign-in/.

Still stuck?

Email support@athenaigrowth.com. Include your account email, what you were trying to do, what happened instead, screenshots if you have them, and a timestamp.

For details on what to include and response-time expectations per tier: /help/account/contact/.

Related

• /help/troubleshooting/sign-in/ — magic link, password reset, account-locked
• /help/account/contact/ — when to chat vs email, response-time expectations
• /help/account/billing/ — billing-specific troubleshooting
• /help/account/custom-domain/ — DNS / SSL specifics

[IMG-TROUBLESHOOTING: dashboard screenshot of the activity log showing a recent error event. Product surface.]