Getting started with CoverGuard

CoverGuard tells you — in seconds — whether a US property is insurable, which carriers are likely writing policies there (a modeled estimate, not a quote), what coverage will roughly cost, and how all of that moves the property's value. This guide gets you from signup to your first Record.

Time: ~5 minutes. You'll need: an email address.

1. Create your account

One sign-up works for everyone — buyers, sellers, agents, lenders, and insurance pros all start at /register. (The old /agents/register link still works; it redirects here.)

Starting from an address instead? Type any U.S. property address into the field on the CoverGuard home page and select Get the record. Your address comes with you — with email and password or with Google — so the first thing you see after accepting the terms is that property, and you won't be asked to type it again.

Want to see a Record first? Just below that field, and on the demo page, a short walkthrough shows the Sample Record: its address, then the answer its Record gives. Nothing is looked up. Its last step has an address field of its own, and an address typed there comes with you in exactly the same way.

Already have an account? The same thing happens when you sign in. If you typed an address and then realised you already had an account, follow Back to login and sign in as usual: you land on that property's record, not an empty dashboard. It keeps for 30 minutes, and it survives leaving the browser and coming back — so answering a call, checking a text, or being bounced out to Google and back won't lose it.

(Signing out ends it, on purpose, so nothing is left behind for whoever picks up the phone next.)

Confirming your email. If your account needs email confirmation first, we send you a link. Clicking it confirms the address and signs you in, and if you started with a property address it takes you straight back to that property, even though the link opens in a new tab. If the link has expired or was already used, you land on the sign-in page with the address still filled in.

Don't have an invitation yet? CoverGuard is in Private Preview while we work closely with our first users. You'll see that said on the site rather than have to guess at it: the button in the top bar reads Request access rather than Get started, with Private Preview beside it. On a smaller screen or a zoomed-in window, open the menu: the same button is there, with a short note above it. The sign-up page tells you the same thing if you get that far. Select Request access, give us your email, and — if you like — say what brings you here. A person on our team reads every request, usually within one business day, and you'll get an email with your own sign-up link. If you got as far as typing an address, we keep it with your request — the form shows it back to you so you can check or change it, and when you sign in it's already waiting as your first search. You don't have to remember it or type it again. If someone at CoverGuard has already invited you, use the link in that email instead — it's tied to your address, and your account type is set up for you (you can still change it).

The page lets you sign up with email + password or Google. When you create a password you enter it twice to confirm — use the eye icon to check what you typed.

Choosing your role takes two quick steps. First, tell us which broadly describes you:

• I'm buying or selling a home
• I work in real estate, lending or insurance

Then pick the specific role inside that group — you'll only be shown the ones that apply, so there's no scrolling past options meant for somebody else. Your role tailors the whole app: which tabs you see, which tools appear, and what the dashboard leads with.

Which role should I pick?

If you're buying or selling a home:

• Home buyer — you're shopping for a home for yourself.
• Home seller — you're preparing to list your home and want to see what buyers will find.

If you work in real estate, lending or insurance (these also ask for your company name):

• Real estate agent — you represent buyers/sellers and manage clients and deals.
• Mortgage — you underwrite or originate loans and care about collateral insurability.
• Insurance broker — you place and service policies with carriers.

Picked the wrong group? Just choose the other one — your role selection resets so you can't accidentally sign up as something you didn't mean to.

"Company Admin" and "CoverGuard Admin" are not self-selectable — they're assigned. Don't worry if you don't see them.

Seeing all five roles in one list instead? We sometimes show the roles as a single list while we fine-tune sign-up. The choice is exactly the same — pick the role from the list above that fits you, and add your company name if you chose one of the three professional roles.

If you arrived from an invitation or a link that already knows your role, both steps are filled in for you and you can go straight to your details — though you can still change either one. If whoever invited you attached a specific property, we carry it all the way through: you'll land on that property's report the moment you finish, without typing the address again.

Already have an account? Sign in at /login — the same sign-in works for everyone, whatever your account type. Forgot your password? Use /forgot-password.

2. Accept terms & disclosures

The first time you sign in, you land on the onboarding screen (/onboarding). You must accept the terms and disclosures before you can use the app — this is required once. If you signed up with Google and skipped it, you'll be redirected back here until you accept.

When we publish an update to our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy or NDA, you'll see this screen once more the next time you sign in, with a short note that the documents have changed. Review and accept the current versions to carry on — nothing in your account changes. (The documents were last updated on October 5, 2026, so if you accepted before then you'll be asked once more.) The date each document took effect is shown at the top of it, and under Account → Legal & Privacy.

3. Meet your dashboard

Where you land. If you brought an address with you — typed on our home page, or attached to your invitation — you go straight to that property's report. If not, you land on the search box with the cursor already in it, ready for the first address you want to check. Either way, your first move is one step, not a hunt around a dashboard.

After that you arrive at your home surface. For roles that have one, that's your Dashboard. If your role doesn't include a dashboard — or you're using the mobile app — you land on the Property tab instead, since that's your natural starting point.

What fills the "Live intelligence feed". The feed on your Dashboard reads your own records and flags what needs you: a saved property with a high combined hazard score, a quote request that has sat pending for a few days, and a deal that hasn't moved stage in a week. Each card says where it came from, for example From your quote requests. It also shows results from your own CoverGuard Agents, captioned with that agent's name, and those agents appear in a strip above the feed: click one to open it on the Agents tab, where you can pause it, edit it or turn it off. Nothing else in the feed is an agent, so there is nothing else to switch off.

We don't make you sit through a tour. The first time, you get a single welcome card: a one-line greeting and the one action worth doing first for your role. Take it and you're straight into a property result; Esc or the × closes it and it comes back next time you sign in, so nothing is lost if you'd rather get on with something else. "Don't show onboarding again" retires it for good. Want it back? Choose Show the welcome again on the Help page (or in your account menu, when you have one) and it opens once, right then. The sign-in screen also tells you whether the welcome will open after you sign in, if you were the last person signed in on that device and didn't sign out.

The rest arrives as you go, not up front. Your dashboard's "Do next" card always shows the single most useful next step for where you actually are — your first property check, then setting up your home baseline, saving a property, turning on a watch agent, and so on. It moves on by itself as you do each one, and when there's genuinely nothing left it says so. Short tips also sit beside the controls they explain, with a link to the full guide.

That's the whole idea: you learn each thing at the moment you can act on it, instead of reading about eight of them before you've seen a single property.

Over your first three weeks you'll also see occasional milestone tips — calm corner pop-ups pointing you at a feature you haven't tried yet, plus a matching email. Dismiss any you don't want; it won't affect the others. To stop the whole drip, open a tip and choose the opt-out.

4. Learn the navigation

The top nav bar (a menu drawer on mobile — tap the ☰ icon) shows a Platform zone of tabs. You only see the tabs relevant to your role, so your set may be shorter than this full list:

Top-right you'll find the notification bell, the Help (?) icon, your avatar (→ Account & settings), and Sign out.

The CoverGuard Advisor panel sits beside every page on a desktop, and is a tap away on a phone. It's context-aware — ask it about the property you're viewing, how a score is calculated, or how to do something in CoverGuard.

5. Run your first property search

1. Click Search in the nav.
2. Type an address (e.g. 123 Main St, Austin TX) — or try natural language like "low-wildfire homes near 78737". Pick a suggestion.
3. You get a Record that leads with the answer: overall risk and cost to insure → which carriers are likely writing it and at what indicative premium → how risk moves the value. Deeper sections (per-peril detail, mitigation, map, photos) follow below.

See Reading a CoverGuard Record for a full tour of what everything means.

6. Do the two or three things that matter for your role

Now jump to your role's onboarding guide — it lists the first-week essentials:

• Home Buyer
• Agent / Broker
• Lender
• Insurance Broker
• Company Admin

Free tier & upgrading

You can start free. The free tier has hard caps — 1 property search, 1 property Record and 5 Advisor questions lifetime — so you can try CoverGuard before you pay.

What your one free Record includes. The first property whose Record you open while signed in is yours to keep, forever — reopen it as often as you like. It carries the CoverGuard Score for that property, the full risk profile (every hazard scored, with the sources behind it), and your cost to insure as a range.

The deeper analysis waits for a paid plan, and you can see exactly what it is: each of those sections stays on the page with a lock and a line saying what is inside — cost broken down by peril, which carriers are writing, the coverage gate, required coverage, placement difficulty, cost burden, the FAIR Plan model, the full insurability reasoning, and the ways to lower the premium. The risk-adjusted value works the same way: where the figure would sit, you see what it is and what it takes to unlock it, rather than an empty space. Every other property shows the band and the property details until you upgrade.

On a paid plan, your monthly Record figure is a real limit — 5 a month on Home Buyer Pro / Home Seller Pro, 25 on Starter, 100 on Pro, and unlimited on Team. Once you have used it, a new property shows the free preview until the month resets. Re-opening a Record you already pulled that month never counts twice, so you keep everything you have already run.

The other monthly figures on the pricing page — searches and saved properties — are included allowances rather than hard limits: we don't cut you off part-way through a month if you go over those. Paid plans also unlock pro features (client management, quote requests, analytics, branded reports, alerts, API, and more). See Teams, seats & billing and the /pricing page.

If a feature shows an upgrade prompt or a lock, that feature needs a higher plan for your role — see Billing, plans & paywalls.

Finding help while you work

You shouldn't have to leave what you're doing to look something up.

• Tips appear beside the thing they explain. Where a screen has something worth knowing, a short note sits next to that control with a link to the full guide. Dismiss it with the × and it stays dismissed — on every device you sign in from, not just this one.
• Nothing interrupts you to teach. We don't open tours or pop-ups at you. In your first session you'll see at most one prompt; everything else waits until you go looking for it.
• New features are there when you want them. When we ship something, a small "N new" badge appears. It opens the rundown when you click it — it won't open itself.
• The full library is at Help in the app, or /help/guides. Every tip you see in the app links back to the same guides, so there's never a version that's out of date.

Trouble getting in?

See Account, login & onboarding troubleshooting for signup errors, the onboarding redirect loop, Google sign-in, and password resets.