Autopilot & Publishing
How the autopilot toggle plans your week, the math behind the count, and what happens when you turn it off.
Run My Blog On Autopilot is the switch on your Home page that puts publishing on a recurring, hands-off cadence. This article covers what the switch actually does week to week; see How autopilot works for the discover-draft-schedule-publish loop it runs underneath.
Nobody's autopilot is on by default. After setup finishes, you get a one-time prompt asking whether to turn it on, write a single test article first, or just look around; if you skip that, the same switch sits on your Home page whenever you're ready. Turning it on requires an active paid plan or trial; a brand-new, unpaid workspace won't show a working switch yet.
While autopilot is off, HarperFlow doesn't write new articles on its own (you can still write an article yourself from Home). Your Home page says so, with a Turn on autopilot button; you can hide that reminder for a week. Articles already on the schedule, including ones you wrote yourself, still publish at their scheduled time unless you skip them. If autopilot is still off after setup, your workspace's owners and admins also get at most two reminder emails: one two days after setup and a last one a week after setup.
The moment you turn it on, that instant becomes your weekly anchor: every 7 days from then on is one cycle. At the start of each cycle, HarperFlow looks at how many articles your plan has left and how many weeks remain until your quota resets, and divides one by the other, rounded to a whole article, to decide that week's count.
For example, 12 articles left with 4 weeks to go plans about 3 for this week. If you also write 2 articles yourself that week, nothing about the current week's plan changes retroactively, but the following week's math sees fewer articles remaining and automatically plans a smaller batch to match. You never get more than your plan allows; a slow week just means a lighter one, not a skipped one.
Once the week's count is set, HarperFlow spreads that many writing sessions across your business days, one article per session. Each article it writes is then scheduled to publish about a day later, never the moment it's written, so there's always room for the veto window before anything goes live.
Every article autopilot writes lands as a scheduled draft with a real publish time, and you get a veto email before that time arrives. See The veto digest and Article states.
If your site requires approval, each article waits under Articles → To approve instead, and nothing goes live until an owner or admin approves it. See How articles go live.
Switching the toggle off stops planning new articles and asks what to do with drafts already on the schedule:
Warning: Credits already spent writing a scheduled draft aren't refunded either way, even if you choose to unschedule it.
Trials get their 3 articles planned across the trial week rather than the usual monthly cycle, so you see the full loop, discovery through a scheduled publish, before you ever pay.
If your plan's articles are already used up for the current period, autopilot plans nothing new until your quota resets. The switch stays on and picks back up automatically once it does; nothing needs re-enabling. Articles already scheduled still publish in the meantime.
This applies to web subscriptions (Webflow and WordPress), which are billed through Stripe. If a payment doesn't go through, HarperFlow stops writing new articles, on autopilot or on demand, until it does. Articles already scheduled still publish at their scheduled time, and you can still skip, reschedule, or publish them yourself. The Plan page shows the failed payment, and only the account owner can fix it there. Once the payment goes through, new articles start again; if autopilot is on, it picks back up on its own.
