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Everything you need to know about using Renewly

Voice of Vendor

Renewals are won at the negotiation table. Voice of Vendor watches public signals about each of your vendors and surfaces them when one of them lands in a moment of weakness right as your contract is up.

Open Vendor Alerts in the Insights section to review your current pending signals, dismiss or acknowledge each one, and opt out of vendors that are too noisy. Per-vendor opt-outs are managed under Settings -> Vendor Alerts.

What we watch

Today we ingest from public sources only. No scraping behind logins, no buying of paid feeds. The list grows over time:

  • Layoff announcements.We pull public layoff-news headlines (currently TechCrunch’s layoffs feed) and pass each one to Claude for per-headline classification. The ones rated negotiation_leverage can fire alerts; the rest are stored as context only.
  • GitHub Releases. For vendors with public GitHub repos we record every new release as a context signal. Routine releases classify as informational and do not fire alerts on their own; they appear on the vendor timeline so you have the context if a layoff signal lands later.
  • Actively-exploited security advisories. We pull the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and emit one signal per entry whose vendor name matches a contract on your portfolio. By construction every entry is a confirmed in-the-wild exploit, so these always classify as negotiation leverage when a renewal lands inside the 180-day window.
  • M&A announcements.We pull TechCrunch’s mergers-and-acquisitions tag feed and let Claude pick the renewal-relevant subject (acquired company gets priority - that’s the contract in flux). Concrete deal announcements classify as negotiation leverage; rumours and roundup posts classify as informational and don’t fire alerts on their own.
  • Funding events.We pull TechCrunch’s funding tag feed and identify the company that raised. By default funding rounds classify as informational - a vendor that just raised at a flat-or-up valuation is in a strong negotiating position, not a weak one. The exception is distress signals (down rounds, bridge rounds, recaps) which the classifier elevates to negotiation leverage when the language suggests it.

Status-page incidents and exec-departure signals are on the roadmap.

When you get an alert

We surface a vendor signal as an alert only when all three are true:

  1. The signal is classified as negotiation_leverage, not just informational noise.
  2. You have a contract for that vendor.
  3. The contract is up for renewal in the next 180 days.

That filter keeps the noise floor low. You will only see signals that actually matter to a negotiation you’re about to have. The 180-day forward window matches the typical enterprise negotiation lead time. A leverage signal that arrives inside the renewal quarter is too late to act on.

Sample contracts excluded

Demo contracts (the seven onboarding examples) are excluded from signal matching, so alerts only fire on your real portfolio.

Opting out per vendor

From any alert card, click Opt out of [Vendor] to silence future signals from that vendor. Manage and reverse opt-outs at Settings -> Vendor Alerts. Opt-outs are scoped to the exact vendor name as detected, so two product lines from the same parent company (for example HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot Sales Hub) are tracked separately.

How we classify

Each raw signal goes through a classifier that puts it in one of three internal buckets:

  • negotiation_leverage. Material to your renewal posture. Layoffs, repeated outages, leadership departures. These are the signals that surface as alerts on the Vendor Alerts page when one of your contracts is renewing within 180 days.
  • informational. Useful context, but not a lever. Funding rounds, new product launches, partnership announcements. Stored for trend analysis; not promoted to alerts.
  • noise. Not material. Marketing posts, reposts, generic press releases. Filtered out at classification and never reach your account.

Only negotiation_leverage signals reach the Vendor Alerts page. Informational and noise buckets stay in the database for trend analysis but are not surfaced.

What to do with an alert

Each alert links back to the source article (for example a layoff news item or status-page incident) and the Renewly contract it pertains to. Use the leverage in your renewal conversation: if a vendor announced layoffs three weeks before your renewal, that is a strong opening to ask for a discount, longer notice window, or capped escalation.