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Upgrading to the Elite plan is a short, self-service flow. This article walks you through the steps from the Billing area to a confirmed Elite account, what each step is doing behind the scenes, and how to recover if something goes wrong.

NearbySpy bills Investigator subscriptions and one-time charges through a single Billing area inside your dashboard. This article explains how subscriptions are organized, where to see what you have paid, and how to update the card on file.

Elite is NearbySpy's premium subscription tier for Investigators.

NearbySpy uses one sign-in page for everyone, Clients and Investigators alike. From that page you can create a new account or sign back into an existing one.

Your NearbySpy account holds Case data, Evidence, Client communications, and in some cases billing details. The password rules below are the minimum we enforce. Meeting the minimum is fine, but on a real PI workload you should aim higher.

Some flows on NearbySpy use a one-time password (OTP) sent by SMS to a phone number you control. The most common are verifying a phone number on an Investigator profile during onboarding, and verifying ownership when claiming an imported listing.

You can sign up or sign in to NearbySpy with a Google account by clicking Continue with Google on the sign-in page. Google handles the password and we never see it. We receive only your verified email address, your name, and your profile photo from Google.

After signing in, NearbySpy sends you to one of two dashboards: the Client dashboard or the Investigator dashboard. Which one you land on is decided by the role on your account, not by anything you click.

The contact form is the official way to reach NearbySpy support. This article explains the reason categories, what to include in your message, and a couple of small details that make sure your form actually goes through on the first try.

NearbySpy gives you two ways to talk to the team about how the product is working. The in-app feedback widget is for quick observations and ideas. The support ticket form is for issues that need a reply, account changes, or a real conversation with a human.

If a Private Investigator on NearbySpy has invited you to a Case, you will receive an email with an Accept link.

Your Client settings page lets you control how you sign in, how you receive notifications, and what your Investigator sees about you. This article walks through the most common settings and what each one does.

NearbySpy video calls let you meet face-to-face with your Investigator without installing software, downloading an app, or sharing a personal phone number.

The Messages panel inside your Case is the fastest way to reach your Investigator without sending email. This article covers what messaging includes, what your Investigator sees, and what to do when a thread feels stuck.

If an Investigator on NearbySpy has sent you a document to sign, you have probably received an email with a link that opens a signing page. That page is powered by DocuSeal, the signing engine NearbySpy uses inside its DocuVault product.

The Documents area is where you find files your Investigator has formally shared with you outside of the Evidence and Reports tabs.

Evidence is the heart of any investigation, and on NearbySpy it is also the most carefully controlled part of your Case.

If your Investigator has shared a Report with you, you will find it in the Reports tab of your Case. This guide explains what you can see, what changes when an Investigator updates a Report, and how to ask for clarifications without leaving the page.

If you opened your Case as a Client and noticed that some tabs — Evidence, Reports, Operations, Notes — are not showing the content you expected (or are missing entirely), this is by design.

A Subject, also called a Person of Interest or POI, is a person an investigation is about. They are not a Client and they are not a Case Member.

Report Writer includes optional AI assistance designed to speed up the boring parts of writing without taking the writing out of your hands.

An Operator is the person who is going to do the work on an Operation. On a solo case the Operator is almost always you. On a team or subcontracted case, the Operator field is how you say who is in the field, who is at the desk, and who is on call.

Every person who can access a Case has a role on that Case. The role decides what they can see and do, separate from their account-level role.

Case Settings is where the Owner or an Admin governs how a single Case behaves. This article explains the controls available, who can change them, and how they interact with platform-wide defaults from your Investigator settings overview.

Before you create your first Case in NearbySpy, run through the checklist below. None of it is required to click Create Case, but each item makes the Case easier to run and easier to defend later if it ever becomes evidence in court.

Every Operation has two parallel streams: a Comments thread that you and your team write deliberately, and an Activity log that NearbySpy writes automatically. Together they answer two different questions — what happened, and what we said about it.

Client visibility on a Case is controlled per Operation, not per Case. By default, Clients see nothing. You decide which Operations to surface to them, and that decision flows through to the Evidence, comments, and activity attached to those Operations.

NearbySpy lets you look at Evidence two ways: inside one Operation, where it was captured, or across the whole Case, where you can see everything at once. The first view is the Operation gallery. The second is the Evidence Locker.

NearbySpy can produce a clean, branded business card from the information already on your Investigator profile. This article walks through where to find the generator, what it includes, and how to share the result with prospective Clients.

Evidence in NearbySpy is the file artifact behind the work — the surveillance photo, the body-cam clip, the PDF of public records, the recorded call.

Notifications and unread badges across the Investigator dashboard tell you where new activity has happened so you can move on it without checking every tab manually.

This article is the map to your Investigator settings. It walks through each major section, what lives there, and the related Help Center articles that go deeper. Use it as a reference when you are looking for a specific control.

You can invite a Client during the Members step of the Create Case wizard. The invitation goes by email and gives the Client access to the Case from their Client dashboard.

Messaging is the working channel between you and your Clients on a Case.

Every Operation in NearbySpy belongs to a Case and carries two attributes that tell your team what the work is and where it stands: a type and a status.

DocuVault turns a static PDF into a signable envelope and routes it to one or more recipients. This article walks through preparing a document, placing fields, sending the request, and tracking it through to a signed original.

Report Writer is the place inside NearbySpy where the work becomes a deliverable.

Video calls in NearbySpy are built into the same Case workspace where Operations, Evidence, and Reports live.

Notes are where the Case-level thinking lives. They are not for chatter on a single Operation — that goes in Comments — and they are not for files — those go in Evidence.

The Create Case wizard walks you through the four pieces of a new Case in order: Basics, Subjects, Members, and Review. Each step saves as you go, and you can step backward to change anything before you submit.

The global Cases views answer questions you cannot answer from inside a single Case.

The Calendar tab on a Case is a time-shaped view of that Case's Operations. Instead of scrolling a list, you see your work laid out by day, week, or month, color-cued by status and easy to drag or click into.

Scout is NearbySpy's in-product assistant for Investigators. It is built into your dashboard and answers questions about your work using the same permissions you already hold.

DocuVault is NearbySpy's e-signing workflow for retainers, releases, NDAs, and other documents that need legally meaningful signatures. It is gated to the Elite plan.

NearbySpy supports two account types: Client and Investigator. The one you pick decides which dashboard you land on, what you can do, and how the platform treats your data.

NearbySpy includes imported listings for many Private Investigators who have not yet created an account. If you are an Investigator and your firm appears on the marketplace without you, you can claim that listing and take control of how it is shown.

Investigator onboarding is a short multi-step flow that sets up your account so the marketplace can list you and so the operations workspace knows who you are. You only do it once.

Claiming an imported listing on NearbySpy includes a verification step. This protects the marketplace from someone claiming a listing they do not own. This article explains the one-time code, the verification documents, and what to do if the process stalls.

If you are claiming an existing NearbySpy listing for your agency, website verification is one of the strongest ways to prove the listing belongs to you.

NearbySpy is two products in one platform: a public marketplace where Clients find vetted private investigators, and a private operations workspace where Investigators run their cases end to end.

Scout pulls from the NearbySpy Help Center every time you ask it a how-to question.

The Help Center is the place to find written answers about NearbySpy. This short guide explains how the index is organized, how to search, and how to get unstuck when an article does not fully answer your question.

NearbySpy publishes two kinds of long-form content: the blog and the Help Center. They look similar from the outside but they exist for different reasons.

You can reach out to an Investigator directly from their public profile, with or without an account. This article explains the choices on a profile page, what the Investigator sees, and what to expect after you send a message.

Featured placements are paid slots that promote your Investigator profile to the top of NearbySpy's directory and search results within a specific geographic area.

The Investigator search on NearbySpy is built on Algolia, with rules that combine location, specialty, credentials, and reputation. This article explains how results are ordered and how the filters change what you see.

NearbySpy is a marketplace, which means a meaningful share of new Investigators and Clients arrive through search engines.

Reviews on NearbySpy are part of how the marketplace builds trust. They appear on Investigator profiles, factor into search ranking, and feed back into the dashboard so Investigators can respond. This article explains how the system works for both sides.

NearbySpy publishes a pricing page for Private Investigators who are considering a paid plan. This article explains what is on that page, how the plans differ, and where to look for the details that matter most before you upgrade.

The NearbySpy marketplace is built so that finding an Investigator and contacting one are the same motion.

NearbySpy publishes location browse pages for cities, regions, and states across the country. These pages give you a curated entry point into the marketplace when you would rather scan a list than type a query into the search bar.

NearbySpy uses Stream Chat to power in-platform messaging between Investigators, Operators, and Clients. Most of the time the connection is invisible — you open Messages and your threads load.

If a NearbySpy video call keeps dropping, freezing, or showing a "Reconnecting…" banner that never clears, the cause is almost always something the platform cannot see — a flaky network, a permissions block, a browser tab fighting for the…

If you opened a Case link or a Case-related page and saw an access-denied screen, this article walks you through why it happens, how to recover, and how to ask the right person for the right fix.

If you tried to send a contact form on NearbySpy and saw a message asking you to refresh and submit again, this article explains what is happening and how to get past it without losing your message.

NearbySpy stores investigative work — Cases, Operations, Evidence, Subjects, and messages — under strict access boundaries that follow how a private investigator actually thinks about confidentiality.

This article describes the security controls that NearbySpy applies across the platform and points you to the legal pages that govern your use of the service.

When a video call is recorded and transcribed inside NearbySpy, the resulting transcript can be shared with specific people via a link.

NearbySpy treats Evidence the way a forensics lab treats samples. Once captured, the artifact does not change. You can stop showing it, you can move it out of view, you can recover it later — but you cannot edit it in place, and you cannot quietly delete it.