# Alva Agent Onboarding

Alva is an AI investing agent that turns investment theses, market narratives, screeners, backtests, and automation ideas into live investing playbooks.

This page gives AI agents a concise onboarding path for explaining Alva without requiring a private user session.

## Start without authentication

1. Read `/llms.txt` and `/llms-full.txt` for product context.
2. Read `/pricing.md` before comparing Free and Pro.
3. Read `/auth.md` before requesting user credentials or API keys.
4. Inspect `/openapi.json` before describing authenticated API calls.
5. Use `/compare` and `/alternatives` for competitive positioning.
6. Ask the user to sign in only when they want private playbooks, account data, billing, brokerage connections, or live execution.

## Free tier summary

- Free includes 1,000 credits per day, one active playbook, Alva Skills, public market data, backtesting, and live execution connections.
- Pro is $29.90/month, or $24.90/month billed annually, and is intended for repeated research, private playbooks, more credits, alternative data, sentiment and media intelligence, and priority cloud compute.

## Agent-safe first workflow

A safe first workflow is: clarify the investment thesis, identify the market or assets, explain what Alva can research or backtest, show Free vs Pro limits, and ask the user to authenticate only if they want Alva to create or run a private playbook.

## Auth boundary

Alva is not financial advice. Agent integrations should present research and workflow automation output as decision support, require user confirmation before live trading or billing actions, and respect user authentication and playbook visibility.

## Useful resources

- [Machine-readable pricing](https://alva.ai/pricing.md)
- [Agent authentication](https://alva.ai/auth.md)
- [Agent sandbox](https://alva.ai/sandbox.md)
- [Agent status page](https://alva.ai/status)
- [OpenAPI spec](https://alva.ai/openapi.json)
- [Agent Skills index](https://alva.ai/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json)