Frequently Asked Questions

Argus is an automated reputational risk screening tool.

You give it a public account or channel, and it pulls that account's public history — posts, reposts and replies on social platforms, or spoken content in videos — then runs every item through an AI classification pipeline that flags content carrying potential reputational risk. Instead of manually working through thousands of items, you get a structured report highlighting what is most likely to matter.

By default, Argus screens against nine reputational risk categories: racism, violent rhetoric, antisemitism, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, hate speech, and extremism. Anything that trips a category is surfaced in your report with the relevant flag attached.

Argus currently covers X (Twitter), Bluesky and YouTube. Select a platform above for the platform-specific detail.

Beyond the nine standard categories, Argus offers a tenth, user-defined class — the Custom Query. Sometimes the standard reputational categories aren't what you're worried about. You might not care about general red flags at all; instead you need to know what an account has said about a specific issue, person, organisation, or set of topics.

A Custom Query lets you define exactly what you're looking for, and Argus classifies the account's history against that brief. It's useful for screening an individual's stated views on a particular policy, checking for past commentary on a company or counterparty, or surfacing everything an account has said across a defined range of subjects.

You can add a Custom Query to a standard scan free of charge — it runs alongside the nine reputational categories at no extra cost. Alternatively, you can switch the nine standard categories off entirely and run a Custom Query on its own. Either way, the scan costs a single credit.

Together, that makes Argus suited to due diligence, vetting, compliance, HR, and communications work where you need to understand someone's public history quickly and defensibly.

Almost every scan costs one credit, whether you run a FastScan or a DeepScan:

• X FastScan — 1 credit
• X DeepScan — 1 credit
• Bluesky FastScan — 1 credit
• Bluesky DeepScan — 1 credit
• YouTube FastScan — 1 credit

The one exception is YouTube DeepScan, which is priced by the amount of footage transcribed: 1 credit per 10 hours of video. So 10 hours costs 1 credit, 20 hours costs 2 credits, and so on.

There are two ways to buy credits: a monthly subscription, or pay-as-you-go. You can pay in GBP, USD, or EUR.

Subscriptions (billed monthly)

Subscribers can buy top-up credits at discounted rates, and the higher the plan, the lower the price per credit — from £25 / $33 / €29 per credit on Individual down to £17 / $22 / €20 on Business (cheaper again in the 5 and 20 credit bundles).

Pay-as-you-go (no subscription)

Pay-as-you-go credits never expire, so they suit occasional use. If you run scans regularly, a subscription works out substantially cheaper per scan.

Note: Prices may change over time, so please consult the billing section for the most up to date prices.

Once you've created an account, go to the Billing section of your dashboard. From there you can start a subscription, or buy pay-as-you-go credits without one — choose your currency and check out. Your credit balance updates immediately and is shown at the top of the screen.

Credits are deducted one per scan as you use them.

It depends on the type of credit.

Monthly plan credits — the credits included with a subscription (Individual, Team, or Business) are use-it-or-lose-it. They reset at the start of each billing cycle: any unused plan credits from the previous month are cleared when your new month's allotment is granted. They do not roll forward.

Top-up credits bought on a subscription — extra credits you purchase on top of your plan never expire and are not affected by the monthly reset. They sit in your balance until you use them.

Pay-as-you-go credits — credits bought without a subscription never expire either. They stay in your balance indefinitely until spent.

When you run a scan, plan credits (which have an expiry) are spent before purchased credits, so your non-expiring top-ups are preserved for as long as possible.

This is by design. We've deliberately tuned the classifier to err on the side of sensitivity, because the cost of missing a genuinely damaging post is far higher than the cost of surfacing a borderline one. As a result, you'll occasionally see content flagged — for example under a category like "racism" — that, on reading, you don't consider a real concern.

That's expected, and to a large extent unavoidable: what counts as a "red flag" is partly subjective and context-dependent, and no automated system can make that judgment perfectly. What Argus does is strip out the overwhelming majority of content that is highly unlikely to be problematic, leaving you a far smaller set to review with human judgment. Even with a few false positives, that saves hours of manual reading per account. Think of the flags as a prioritised shortlist for your attention, not a final verdict.

We want to hear it. You can email us at info@argusgroup.ai, or use the form in the Help section of your dashboard — just enter your email and your inquiry or feedback and hit send. Feature requests, bug reports, and general suggestions are all welcome and genuinely shape what we build next.