Every question, answered.
How Synthia works, what each use case does, and what it will not do.
Getting started
What Synthia is, who it is for, and what it won’t do.
Synthia is an AI analyst built for CPG founders. You ask in plain English and it answers from live data: prices and promos across a catalog of 200K+ online listings, plus what people are saying on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit.
ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI assistant. Synthia is built around the specific questions CPG founders ask, and connects those questions to CPG data, live market signals, and sources beyond the public web.
Yes, when the numbers come from real sources. A general chatbot writes a confident answer from what it remembers or can find. Synthia calls tools that read the shelf and the social conversation and answers only with what they return, with the source beside every number. It doesn’t replace surveys, store sales data, or your judgment about what to launch. It replaces the slow part, the digging.
No. Synthia can prepare emails, pitches, briefs, and other actions, but you stay in control. Nothing gets sent without your approval. It doesn’t change your prices or your listings either.
Yes. Synthia can help before you launch: from understanding your category and competitors to setting a price, finding whitespace, researching retailers, and building your launch plan.
Joining is free. We email you when the dashboard opens, with a live read of your category, and you start with 1,000 free credits. The dashboard has no price yet.
Yes. In the dashboard, any chart downloads as an image, ready to drop into a deck or a sell sheet.
You do. The pitches, emails, briefs and charts Synthia makes for you are yours to use however you like.
Email hey@heysynthia.ai, or use the Contact page, where you can also book a demo. Someone reads every message.
Join the waitlist and we’ll open the dashboard with a live read of your category. If you want to start now, the tools behind every use case run through the Syntalic MCP server in Claude, Codex or the agent of your choice: see Developers.
Cost
What a question costs, and how the data is paid for.
You can pay per question instead of per month. Synthia’s catalog tools are free, and most paid reads cost 1 to 3 cents a call (Share of shelf, which maps your competitors, is 1 cent; Price bands is 2). No call costs more than 10 cents, and a question usually makes a handful of them, so an answer costs cents, with no seat and no minimum. That is how the MCP works today. The dashboard is on the waitlist and has no price yet.
Synthia can access paid data sources and APIs as part of its workflow, so you don’t need to maintain a separate subscription for every source just to answer one question. When a call costs money, it is paid for that one call, and Synthia asks before it buys from an outside source.
Data and trust
Where the numbers come from, what they cover, and how far to trust them.
They are different data. Circana and NielsenIQ sell retail measurement: sales from store registers and consumer panels, which is how you see what sold at a store. Synthia reads the online shelf, meaning prices, promos, availability and brand share across 300+ retailers, most of it from brands’ own online stores, plus the social conversation, and answers in plain English. It can’t show how much a product sells, in a store or online, so for unit sales you still need a panel. Synthia isn’t a replacement for that. It is the quick read of what the shelf looks like and what people are saying.
Only partly. Target is covered online: about 750 listings, around 50 of them food and drink. Kroger has almost nothing yet, and Whole Foods and Sprouts aren’t covered. Nothing comes from a store’s registers or its in-store shelves: Synthia reads online listings only. Most of it, 80% of listings, comes from brands’ own online stores, with Amazon, Walmart, Target and the rest of the 300+ retailers making up the remainder. The large platforms are re-read daily and smaller retailers less often, and the free Coverage map shows where the data is solid and where it is thin.
Apparel, electronics, home and garden, and health and beauty, in that order. Apparel alone is 31% of listings. Food and beverage is a small part so far: about 6,800 listings, 3% of the catalog, mostly from brands’ own online stores. A food or drink read can be thin, and Synthia says so when it is. The free Coverage map shows what there is for your category before you spend.
It may be. The catalog tracks 11K+ brands, mostly ones that sell through their own online store, and checking is free: List brands looks a brand up by name. If yours isn’t there, Synthia says so rather than guessing, and you can still read your category and your competitors.
No. Synthia reads what people post on TikTok, not what sells on TikTok Shop. TikTok Shop listings and prices aren’t in the catalog.
Yes, those two countries and no others yet. Amazon, Walmart and most large retailers are read in both. Some, like Target, are US only, and some are Canada only.
The largest sources, meaning brands’ own online stores, Amazon, Walmart and Target, are re-read daily. Smaller retailers are re-read less often, from every few days to every few weeks. The free List retailers tool shows when each one was last read.
Yes. Synthia is built by the company behind the Crush app, and some of its data comes from Crush. Today that is pricing. A consumer panel is coming soon, and so are offers: a brand will be able to make an offer to Crush users, who can buy the product and create content for the brand directly.
Every number comes from a tool’s response, not from the model’s memory, and the source is shown beside it. Answers are tested the same way: a number that doesn’t match the tool response counts as a failure. Where the data behind a read is thin, Synthia says so and gives it as direction, not a verdict, and the free Coverage map shows where the data is solid and where it is thin before you spend.
No AI can predict that with certainty. Synthia can surface the signals behind the opportunity: pricing, competition, availability, demand, attention, and category dynamics, so you can make a more informed decision.
Synthia and Syntalic
Two names, one dataset: which is which, and which to use.
Not quite. Synthia is the AI analyst you talk to. Syntalic is the data and API that Synthia runs on. Synthia is built on Syntalic, and Syntalic is also open on its own for developers.
If you want answers, use Synthia: ask a question in plain English, or join the waitlist for the dashboard. If you are building your own agent or app, use Syntalic: its MCP server and API give your agent the same tools, paid per call.
Use cases
What each use case does, and where its data comes from.
Get on the shelf
Yes. Buyer contact lookup finds the category buyer’s verified contact, bought for this one question, with no list to subscribe to. You see who it is, and the pitch, before anything goes out.
Numbers from the buyer’s own shelf: who holds the listings, from Share of shelf, and where the price tiers are crowded or open, from Price bands. The pitch is about their category, not your deck.
Budget for promos
No. Slotting fees are negotiated with each retailer and aren’t published. What it shows is how your category discounts, the part of trade spend you can plan from the shelf.
A price below the listed price when it was checked. Promo intelligence counts how often that happens for each brand and how deep the discount goes.
Get funded
Fundable, via Orthogonal: funding rounds, and the investors on each deal. Synthia pays for it per call, for this one question.
Brands in your category that raised in the last year. Brand momentum finds them, and the investors you get back are the ones who led those rounds.
Price your launch
Then the promo price is the real price, and you should know it before you pick yours. Promo intelligence shows who is on deal, how often, and how deep, so you can see whether the band is set by shelf prices or by discounts.
Yes. Name it in your question. Price positioning places that brand’s price against its competitors, and Price bands shows which tier it sits in and how crowded that tier is.
Retailers set their own prices, and some discount harder than others. Price dispersion measures how far prices swing across retailers in your category, so a wide swing tells you the band is looser than any single shelf suggests.
Price for wholesale
Keystone means the retailer doubles your wholesale price to set the shelf price, a 50% margin. Many retailers ask for less or more, so Synthia works out wholesale at keystone and at other margins.
Not in the data. If you sell through a distributor, their cut comes out between your wholesale price and the retailer’s cost, so leave room for both.
Choose your first flavor
No one can promise that. It shows which flavors and packs are already on the shelf, what they sell for, and how often they run out, so you choose with the shelf in front of you instead of a comment poll.
Yes. Competitive landscape lists each product as it’s sold, so variety packs, 12-packs and single cans show up with their own prices.
Map your competitors
That is the point of it. Share of shelf and Competitive landscape read every brand listed in your category across the 300+ retailers we cover, not only the ones you name.
Yes. Brand tracker follows a brand’s pricing and positioning over time, and Brand breakdown shows what it actually sells, category by category.
Yes. Brand share adds each brand’s share of the conversation on TikTok and Instagram, so you see who is loud as well as who is listed.
Read the category
Category concentration says whether a few brands own the category or it is open. A concentrated one means fighting incumbents for the same shelf; an open one means room, and usually more small brands competing for it.
No. Classify product type works out what a product is however each retailer shelves it, so the read is of your real category rather than one retailer’s label for it.
Watch the shelf
Read the drop against its history. Price history shows how a product’s price has moved over time, so you can see whether a new price is a first or a pattern, and Deal finder shows the deepest discounts in the category right now.
Inflation tracker shows how fast prices are rising across the whole category. If a competitor’s rise matches that, it is the category moving. If it runs well ahead, it is their own decision.
Get people talking
From the creators already posting about your category: Creator index finds the ones driving the conversation, ranked by who is actually talking about it rather than by follower count. Creator audience data then shows who actually follows each of them.
Only when you approve. It drafts a note for each creator and sends it from your own address, so the replies come back to you.
No. Synthia sees a post’s views and who posted it, not the orders that followed. To tie sales to a creator you need your own store’s data, such as a discount code or a tracked link for each one.
Read the conversation
TikTok and Instagram, week by week: Social series reads mentions and views, and Creator index shows the creators driving the conversation. It reads Reddit too, bought per call from an outside source when a question needs it.
Attention vs shelf answers that. It sets each brand’s share of the conversation against its share of listings. A brand talked about far more than it is stocked is one kind of signal; a brand stocked everywhere but rarely mentioned is another.
Spot who’s rising
Three different signals. Brand momentum reads brands rising or falling in the conversation. Launch buzz sets new arrivals on the shelf against the buzz around their brand. Price change leaders lists the biggest price movers.
Price movers can be read over 7, 30 or 90 days. The conversation is tracked week by week, so a brand’s momentum is a trend, not one viral post.
Ready to get started?
Join the waitlist now, or contact us to design a custom package for your business.Join the waitlist now, or contact us to design
a custom package for your business.
