Concepts

Instasent is built from a handful of concepts that repeat everywhere — in the dashboard, in these guides and in the API. Once you have this map, every screen makes sense. It's a five-minute read.

The map

Concept	What it is	Where in the dashboard
Organization	Your account: team, billing, legal profiles. Contains projects.	Settings → Organization → General (or Billing, Team…)
Project	A workspace, usually one per brand. Holds everything below.	Project switcher, top of the sidebar
Audience	Your contacts, with their attributes and events.	Audience → Contacts
Segment	A saved, dynamic slice of the audience.	Audience → Segments
Data source	A way contacts and events come in: CSV, connector, API.	Audience → Data sources
Channel & sender	How messages travel (SMS, RCS) and the identity they show.	Settings → Channels
Campaign	A one-off send to a segment.	Campaigns
Automation	A sequence that messages contacts when they take an action.	Automations → Sequences

How it all flows, from data to delivered message:

flowchart TD
    DS[Data sources] -->|contacts and events| AUD[Audience]
    AUD -->|sliced into| SEG[Segments]
    SEG -->|targeted by| CAMP[Campaigns]
    AUD -->|events trigger| AUTO[Automations]
    CAMP -->|sent via channels| OUT[Delivered messages]
    AUTO -->|sent via channels| OUT
    OUT -->|measured in| INS[Insights]

How they relate

A few relationships aren't obvious at a glance and are worth pinning down:

A project has several data sources but a single audience.
A segment is a dynamic view over the audience, not a container of contacts (see Segments).
A campaign always uses one channel and one sender.
An automation always sends over a channel, triggered by an event.

And what contains what:

flowchart TD
    P[Project] --> AUD[Audience]
    P --> CAMP[Campaigns]
    P --> AUTO[Automations]
    P --> CH[Channels]
    AUD --> CON[Contacts]
    AUD --> SEG[Segments]
    CH --> SMS[SMS]
    CH --> RCS[RCS]

Organization & projects

Your organization is the account level: the team and its roles, billing and balance, legal profiles, API tokens. Everything you operate day to day lives one level down, inside a project.

A project is a self-contained workspace: its own audience, segments, senders, brand profile, campaigns and analytics. Most organizations run one project per brand or product line — contacts and consent never leak between projects, so two brands stay cleanly separated while sharing the same team and balance. Switch or create projects from the project switcher at the top of the sidebar.

Audience: contacts, attributes & events

The audience is every contact your project knows, unified into one profile per person. Each contact carries:

Attributes — profile fields: name, phone, country, plus any custom field you define, and per-channel subscription status.
Events — what the contact does: placed an order, abandoned a cart, clicked a link. Events come in through data sources and power triggers and segments.

Contacts arriving from different sources are deduplicated and merged, so a customer who exists in your store and your CRM is still one contact. The full model lives in Audience.

Segments

A segment is a saved slice of the audience: contacts matching conditions you combine with AND/OR — over attributes ("country is Spain") and events ("ordered in the last 90 days"). Segments are dynamic: contacts enter and leave as their data changes, so a segment is always current when a campaign uses it.

A segment doesn't store contacts of its own: it automatically shows the audience contacts that match the conditions — closer to a query or a view than to a list. So deleting a segment doesn't delete its contacts, and editing a contact from a segment updates it in the audience (it's the same contact). Built and managed under Audience → Segments.

Data sources

A data source is any way contacts and events enter the project: a CSV upload, a native connector (Shopify, HubSpot, Klaviyo and many more), a webhook, or the API. Sources keep syncing once connected — your audience stays live, not a snapshot. See Data sources & integrations.

Channels & senders

A channel is the medium a message travels on. Today that's SMS (universal reach, every project) and RCS (branded, interactive, with automatic SMS fallback) — WhatsApp is coming. A sender is the identity your messages show: your brand name on SMS, your verified agent on RCS. Senders are created per project and, in regulated countries, registered with the local regulator before they can send. The whole story lives in Channels & senders.

Campaigns

A campaign is a one-off send: you pick a channel and sender, target segments, write the message and send now or on a schedule. Cost is estimated before you confirm, and results — delivery, clicks, revenue — are attributed back to the campaign. Start with Creating a campaign.

Automations

An automation is a message — or a short series of them — that sends itself when a contact does something: a welcome series on signup, a reminder when a cart is abandoned. Today automations are Sequences: linear, event-triggered series with delays between messages. A visual canvas for branching journeys is not yet available — it's planned for the future. See Automations.

Every send respects the contact's subscription status for that channel. Opt-outs (like a STOP reply) are processed automatically, and each campaign carries a compliance policy that decides who it may reach. SMS and RCS share consent — they reach the same phone. The full model is in Consent & subscriptions.

AI in the dashboard

AI shows up where you work: it writes and rewrites campaign copy in your brand voice inside the editor, and the dashboard's assistant answers questions about your project — performance, segments, audience — proposing actions that you approve. You can also connect external AI agents to your account through Connected apps. The overview lives in AI at Instasent.

Got the model? Put it to work: the Start guide takes you from an empty account to your first send.