Resident questions, answered from your association's own documents.
Porchlight AI answers residents twenty-four hours a day using your declaration, rules, fee schedule and amenity hours — and sends everything it shouldn't answer straight to your office with the resident's contact details attached.
For Florida HOA and condominium associations, and the companies that manage them.
Try it now
Ask it something a resident would ask.
This is the assistant for a demonstration community — Harbour Point Condominium, a 180-unit building with a declaration, house rules, a fee schedule and a special assessment loaded into it. Nothing here is scripted marketing copy: every answer comes out of those documents.
- It quotes amounts, dates and deadlines exactly as the documents state them.
- It answers in the language the resident writes in.
- Ask about solar panels to watch it refuse and hand off instead of guessing.
What it does
Three things, and nothing else.
Answers from your documents
Upload the declaration, the rules, the fee schedule, the amenity hours and the architectural guidelines. Residents ask in plain language and get the answer your documents already give, quoted rather than paraphrased.
Routes what it shouldn't answer
Account balances, legal interpretation, disputes between neighbors, anything the documents do not cover — it stops, collects the resident's name and contact details, and puts it in your inbox with the question attached.
Tells you what it couldn't answer
Once a month you get a report: the questions residents asked most, how many were answered, and the specific gaps in your documents that caused a handoff. Boards read that page.
It answers in the language the resident wrote in.
No setting to change, no second copy of your documents to maintain. A resident writes in Spanish, the answer comes back in Spanish, out of the same English rules you uploaded. The routed question still arrives in your inbox in a form your office can read.
Resident
¿Cuáles son las horas de la piscina?
Porchlight AI
La piscina está abierta de 8:00 AM a 10:00 PM. No hay salvavidas.
Drawn from the English house rules in the uploaded document set.
The guardrail
It refuses to guess. That is the design.
An assistant that always has an answer is a liability. One confidently wrong sentence about a deadline, a fee or a rule ends up in front of a board.
Porchlight AI is instructed to answer only from the documents you upload, to copy amounts and dates verbatim, and to stop the moment coverage runs out. When it stops, the resident is not left at a dead end — it asks for their name and the best way to reach them, and the question arrives in your console as a routed item with the full conversation attached.
It gives no legal advice, never interprets the declaration, never speculates about what the board intended, and tells anyone describing an emergency to call 911 first.
Resident: Can I put solar panels on my roof and who approves it?
Solar panels on your roof would require an architectural application to the association. However, the community documents do not specify whether solar panels are approved, what the approval process entails beyond the architectural application requirement, or any conditions that might apply.
Please contact the management office in writing with your question, and they will direct you to the board or the appropriate review committee.
Routed to the officeThe manager's side
One console, three jobs.
Where the routed questions land, where the newsletter gets drafted, and where the monthly board report comes from. Screenshots of the working software.
Setup
Two lines on your community website.
No portal migration, no resident accounts, nothing for residents to install. The widget sits on the page residents already visit, and it works the same on a phone.
<script src="https://app.getporchlightai.com/porchlight.js"
data-community="your-community" defer></script>If you manage more than one community
Every building is separate. The inbox is yours.
A management company runs one login across a book of associations. Each community keeps its own documents, its own answers and its own routed questions, and nothing crosses between them.
Walled off by community
Harbour Point's declaration never answers a Palm Grove question. A community's documents and conversations are only ever used for that community, which matters when two boards ask you the same thing and expect different answers.
One console, one invoice
Switch communities from a menu rather than logging in five times. Portfolio covers up to fifty associations at one monthly price, billed to you rather than to each board.
Evidence for the annual meeting
The monthly report per community gives you a page showing what residents asked and what your documents failed to answer — useful when a board asks what the management fee covers.
Your name on it, not mine
On paid plans the Porchlight AI badge comes off the widget. Residents see their association's assistant, which is what you want them to see.
Managers usually start with one difficult building rather than the whole book. The thirty-day pilot is built for exactly that.
Pricing
Priced per community, stated openly.
A conversation is one resident session, however many questions it contains. Every plan includes the routed inbox, the newsletter drafting and the monthly board report.
Starter
$0
free, no expiry
- Conversations50 / month
- Communities1
- Routed inboxIncluded
- Newsletter & reportIncluded
- Porchlight AI badgeShown
For a small self-managed association testing the idea.
Community Single community
$149
per month
- Conversations1,000 / month
- CommunitiesUp to 3
- Routed inboxIncluded
- Newsletter & reportIncluded
- BadgeRemoved
One association, or a small manager with two or three buildings.
Portfolio
$499
per month
- ConversationsEffectively unmetered
- CommunitiesUp to 50
- Routed inboxPer community
- Newsletter & reportPer community
- BadgeRemoved
Management companies running a book of associations.
Self-service sign-up and card billing are being built. Until they are live, every community starts with the thirty-day pilot below and is invoiced directly afterward — so you are never charged for something before you have seen it work on your own documents.
Thirty-day pilot
Four questions, one week, free.
The fastest way to find out whether this is useful for your community is to watch it answer your own documents. No contract, no card.
- Send four questions your residents ask constantly, and the documents that answer them.
- Within a week you get a working assistant loaded with your community's documents.
- Put it in front of your board, or on the community website, for thirty days.
- Keep it or walk away. If you walk away, your documents are deleted on request.
Prefer to talk first? A fifteen-minute walkthrough works too — say so in the notes and you will get times the same day.
Who built this
Ryan Welch, Owner & Developer
Porchlight AI is built and run by one person in Parrish, Florida. I wrote the software, I answer the email, and I set it up for your community myself.
That is the trade: there is no support tier and no account manager, but there is also nobody between you and the person who can change the product. If the assistant gets something wrong in your community, tell me and it gets fixed that week.
Questions
What boards and managers ask first.
What happens to our documents?
They are stored to answer your residents' questions and for nothing else. They are not sold, not shared with other communities, and not used to train any AI model. Each community's documents are kept separate, and the assistant for your community can only read your community's documents.
On request, your documents and conversation history are deleted.
Who can see what residents ask?
You can, in the console. Residents do not create accounts and are not asked to identify themselves unless a question is being routed to your office, at which point they choose to give a name and a way to be reached. Ask residents not to send sensitive personal information, the same as you would for any contact form.
What if the assistant is wrong?
It is built to refuse rather than guess, which is why it hands off instead of improvising. If it does answer something incorrectly, the usual cause is a document that is out of date or contradicts another one — the monthly report exists to surface exactly that. Send it to me and I will fix the behavior.
It is an assistant, not an authority. It quotes your documents; the board and the manager remain the decision-makers.
Does this replace our manager?
No. It takes the same four questions off them. Pool hours, guest parking, when the assessment is due, what the rules say about pets — the questions that arrive forty times a month and never need judgment. Anything that needs judgment still goes to a person, by design.
How long does setup take?
A week, usually less. Most of it is reading your documents and checking the answers before residents see them. The technical part is two lines on your community website.
Can we cancel?
Yes, monthly, with no cancellation fee and no notice period. Remove the two lines from your website and ask for your data to be deleted. Nothing is held hostage.
Is it only for Florida?
It works anywhere, but it is built and supported from Manatee County and the first communities are here on the Gulf Coast. Florida associations have particular pressures — milestone inspections, structural reserves, special assessments — and the answers residents need reflect that.