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Autopilot works the way an analytics platform does: it reads your database, never writes to it, and builds its understanding of your users from what they actually do. The difference is that Autopilot also acts on what it finds, with a person from our team reviewing every step and you approving every send.

1. Connect

One read-only connection to your Postgres or Supabase database, plus your website URL. Usually live within a day, no code.

2. Diagnose

Autopilot builds your activation funnel, finds where users stall, and ranks the emails you should be sending by impact.

3. Activate

We draft the workflows, you approve them, and they run in real time off activity in your database. Every week you get a report of what moved.
Database compatibility: Autopilot connects to PostgreSQL and Supabase databases. See Connect your database for requirements.

The loop

1

Connect your database

You create a read-only database user and share a connection string, enabling logical replication first if your provider doesn’t already. No SDK, no webhooks, no tracking script. Setup details.
2

Autopilot learns your product

From your database, Autopilot understands who your users are, what they do, and what activation means in your product. From your website, it learns your positioning, pricing, features, and voice.
3

Your funnel, measured

Autopilot builds a funnel specific to your business, from signup to habit, and measures it week over week. You see exactly where users drop off and what it is costing you.
4

Gaps become proposals

Autopilot identifies the moments where a message would move a user forward and drafts the workflow: who it goes to, when, and what it says. Previews render with real rows from your database, so you see the exact email a real user would receive.
5

You approve

A Dreamlit expert reviews every proposal before it reaches you. You approve, edit, or decline.
6

Workflows run in real time

Once live, a workflow fires the moment the matching activity lands in your database. Delivery, timing, retries, and unsubscribe handling are all taken care of.
7

The weekly report

Deliveries, opens, clicks, and funnel movement feed back in. Every week you get a report of what we shipped, what it moved, and what is next, and campaigns keep being adjusted as results come in.

How Autopilot reads your database

Autopilot connects the same way modern analytics and data platforms do. Your database keeps a built-in, ordered feed of every committed change. Autopilot subscribes to that feed through a read-only user. This is the standard, log-based approach to change data capture (CDC) that data platforms such as Fivetran and Airbyte use to keep a warehouse in sync, and it is the same mechanism PostgreSQL uses for its own replication.
  • Nothing is installed in your database. No triggers, no tables, no functions, no schema. Your app does not change, and your schema does not change.
  • It never writes to your data. The Autopilot user can read your tables and follow the change feed. It can’t insert, update, delete, or alter anything.
  • It’s light on your database. Following the change feed is light work for your database, much lighter than repeatedly querying your tables.
  • It’s real time. A change is visible to Autopilot moments after it commits, so a nudge can go out while the moment still matters.

What happens at setup

When you connect, Autopilot reads the current contents of the tables that matter for your funnel once. This is the same initial sync an analytics warehouse performs. Large tables are read in small batches in the background, so your database keeps serving your app as usual. When that read completes, Autopilot is ready. From then on, only new activity can trigger a workflow. Setup itself never sends anything: rows that already existed, and changes that happened while Autopilot was getting ready, shape the funnel but do not start a campaign.

After setup

Autopilot keeps its own up-to-date copy of the fields it uses, maintained from the change feed. That copy is what lets it measure your funnel over time, evaluate workflow conditions, and render previews without querying your database again and again. If the connection drops, or Dreamlit is briefly unavailable, your database holds the changes until we reconnect. Autopilot then picks up exactly where it left off. Nothing is missed, and nobody gets the same email twice.
Want the details on what is read, what is kept, and how to revoke access? See Your data.

Where workflows run

Autopilot’s campaigns run on the Dreamlit Engine, the same workflow runtime behind Dreamlit’s self-serve product. Autopilot workflows trigger from the change feed rather than from the database triggers the self-serve Engine installs, so nothing is added to your database. Each step runs durably with automatic retries, wait steps are scheduled for you, and every send is tracked for delivery and engagement. Autopilot workflows can be inspected and re-run in your Dreamlit dashboard like any other. The Dreamlit Engine docs cover the runtime in depth.

How Autopilot compares


Last validated: 2026-09-08