Questions, answered plainly.
No hedging. If the honest answer is no, we say no.
What is Temperance?
Temperance is an AI negotiator for supplier sourcing. It runs inside your own WhatsApp and Instagram accounts and handles the back and forth for you. You set a target price, a ceiling, a quantity range and any hard spec. It comes back with a deal that clears all of them, or the reason it walked. It gives you the best chance of agreeing on a price. It does not guarantee one.
How much time does this save me?
A negotiation is usually days of short messages, and most of it is waiting. It carries the opening, the counters, the follow-up nobody wants to send, the supplier who goes quiet for two days. One of ours ran 45 messages. You spend minutes setting the limits and minutes approving the result. Across twenty suppliers, that is a lot of your time back.
How much does Temperance cost?
$299 a month for up to 15 suppliers, $750 a month for up to 50. Past 50, email us for a quote. Every size includes unlimited negotiations, both channels, the console and every model cost. No per-seat pricing, no per-deal fee, no cut of what you save. Pause any month and everything is kept.
Can it spend my money?
No. It has no payment method, no card and no banking details, and will not accept or share any. When a deal closes it tells the supplier the funds are coming. You send the wire.
How does it stop itself paying too much?
Six rules decide, and they are written in plain code, not left to the model. A price ceiling. A quantity range. A plausibility floor that parks anything at or under a quarter of your target price. Hard spec on anything you marked. A block on paying money up front. A total exposure cap with your approval limit on top. An offer has to clear all six or it does not close.
Will the supplier know they are talking to an AI?
It writes inside your own account, and it does not announce that it is software. Suppliers are still talking to the brand they already know. Drafts get checked for anything that reads like a machine wrote it: long paragraphs, filler, bullets, sign-offs. Replies land at a human delay and stop overnight in your timezone. If you would rather tell your suppliers what you are using, that is your call and nothing stops you.
What happens when a supplier lies?
Every number they state is stored and checked against the rest. If they call $12.50 their absolute floor on Monday and quote $11.20 on Thursday, it has both and asks what changed, once, without lecturing. Pressure with nothing checkable behind it, the other buyer nobody names, the deadline that appeared from nowhere, gets named and discounted instead of paid for. You would have lost track of that by day two. It does not.
Which channels does it work on?
WhatsApp and Instagram direct messages. Neither has an official API for this, so it works them in a real browser on your logged in session. That is why it runs on a machine you control, or in a process we run for you. A doctor command tells you when a login has gone stale.
What kind of buying is it good at?
Repeat buying from suppliers you negotiate with in a chat thread. Apparel and blanks first: tees, hoodies, cut and sew, prints and colourways. Then packaging, components, ingredients, freight, event and venue quotes. Anywhere the price comes out of a conversation instead of a checkout page, and the same pile of messages happens again every month.
How do I know it will behave before it talks to a real supplier?
It was run against twelve simulated suppliers and eighteen scenarios before it touched a real thread. The volume trap. The fabric swap. The five-cent shirt. The deposit demand. The pasted instructions. The bot question. The voice-note demand. The limit that quietly vanishes from a confirmation. You can replay all of it against your own limits before it messages anyone you actually buy from.
I only buy from a few suppliers. Is it worth it?
The $299 size covers up to 15 suppliers, so a brand with two or three is paying for time, not volume. If those threads eat days every month, you get that time back. If you buy once a quarter and the price never moves, probably not. Email us and we will say so.
Who built Temperance?
Two founders. One of them runs an apparel brand that buys about $50,000 a month from suppliers, and built this because the back and forth was eating his time. Launched September 2026.
How do I get started?
Email william@trytemperance.com and tell us what you buy and how often. We reply with a WhatsApp number and set it up against your limits. No signup form, no card page.
Ask us the hard one.
Whatever is actually stopping you. We answer in a sentence or two.
Email us. We reply with a WhatsApp number. That is the setup.