Frequently asked questions
Everything we get asked, answered plainly. If your question isn't here, contact us and we'll answer it directly, and probably add it to this page.
About the product
What does Benefits Studio actually do?
It takes your plan documents, extracts the details, and turns them into a mobile-friendly benefits website your employees will actually use. Every published portal includes a benefit wallet, plan detail pages, a document library, and Benny, an assistant employees can ask questions to. Setup takes about five minutes per portal.
How is this different from what my HRIS already offers?
An HRIS is built for enrollment and administration. It's where employees make elections and where you manage payroll deductions. Benefits Studio is built for education, the place employees go the other fifty weeks of the year when they need to remember what their deductible is or which pharmacy is in-network. Different jobs, both useful. Most of our customers use both.
Do employees need to download an app?
No. Benefits Studio is a website. Employees bookmark a URL and open it in any browser. No app to install, no account to create, no password to remember. It's mobile and tablet friendly.
What about the AI, is that reliable?
Benny only answers from the documents you uploaded to that specific portal. It doesn't guess, doesn't pull from general internet knowledge, and doesn't make up numbers. Every answer includes a citation to the exact page it came from, so employees can verify it themselves. If the answer isn't in the documents, Benny says so and points to the carrier's phone number.
What kinds of benefit documents can I upload?
Summary of Benefits and Coverage documents, plan booklets, formularies, dental and vision plan summaries, EAP materials, wellness program info, 401(k) summaries, anything you'd normally hand an employee at open enrollment. PDFs work best. Multiple documents per plan are fine.
Can I handle multiple plan tiers, like a PPO and an HDHP?
Yes, on every plan. When an employer offers both a PPO and an HDHP for medical, they show up as separate cards on the wallet, each with its own details, documents and costs, and Benny knows which plan an employee is asking about. There is no cap on how many plans a benefit can have.
Where do employee premiums and payroll contributions go?
Each plan has a contribution table: the employee's share by coverage tier (employee only, employee + spouse, and so on), per paycheck or per month, with the employer's share optional. Enter it by hand, paste it from a spreadsheet, or copy it from another plan; it shows on the plan page as "Your cost" and Benny quotes it. Like everything else, it goes live only after you confirm it. Contributions that vary by employee group? Give each table a label (for example, Salaried) — full support for employee classes is coming.
Can I attach more than one document to a plan, like an SPD alongside the SBC?
Yes. Each plan has a plan summary (the SBC or benefits guide we extract details from) plus any number of supporting documents — an SPD, a rate sheet, a formulary, legal notices. Supporting documents are read by Benny and linked on the plan pages you choose: one plan, every plan in a category, or the whole site. A document that describes several plan options can be split into separate plans with one click.
How does Benefits Studio handle plan year rollovers?
Every portal supports overlapping plan periods. When it's time for open enrollment, you create the upcoming plan year alongside your current one, upload the new documents, and review what Benny extracts. Employees can preview the upcoming benefits during open enrollment, and Benny can answer questions about them, cleanly labeled as “For your upcoming plan year.” When you're ready to flip, one click makes the new plan year live. The old one moves to an archive URL and stays accessible for a year, in case an employee is asking about a claim from the previous year.
Can different employee groups have different plan year start dates?
No. Benefits Studio treats each portal as having one plan year at a time, applied to all groups (executive, hourly, part-time, etc.) at once. If your organization has genuinely separate plan years for different populations, some union arrangements or multi-entity employers, a consultant can set up each population as a separate portal to handle it. This keeps the tool simple for the vast majority of employers who use one plan year for everyone.
What happens to the previous plan year after we roll over?
The old plan year moves to an archive URL like acme.benefitsstudio.com/archive/2025-plan-year and stays accessible for 365 days. Employees can still look up details from it, and Benny can still answer questions about it (clearly labeled as the previous year's plan). After 365 days, it's automatically removed. You can also delete it manually earlier if you want to.
Can employees see next year's benefits before open enrollment?
Yes, if you want them to. You control when to publish the preview. Most employers turn it on 30-60 days before the new plan year starts, during their open enrollment communications. There's a soft warning if you try to preview a plan year more than 4 months ahead, since that's usually longer than you'd want employees speculating on future coverage, but you can override it.
Does Benny know the difference between this year's plan and next year's?
Yes. Benny answers strictly from the documents attached to whichever plan year the employee is currently viewing. On your current benefits site, Benny only sees this year's documents. On the preview site, Benny only sees next year's, and prefixes answers with “For your upcoming plan year.” Benny doesn't try to compare plan years or explain what's changing between them, that's what your open-enrollment communications are for.
About setup
How long does it actually take to build a portal?
For most employers, about five minutes end to end. You upload plan documents, review what Benny extracted from them (deductibles, copays, contacts), edit anything that needs correcting, add your logo and colors, and publish. The longest part is usually gathering the documents.
What if the AI extracts something wrong?
Nothing goes live without your review. Every extracted value shows up in a review screen with the source document and page number linked next to it, so you can check the original in one click. You confirm, edit, or reject each item. A portal cannot publish until every field has been reviewed. Rubber-stamping is discouraged by design.
Do I need any technical skills?
No. If you can upload a PDF, drag a logo file, and pick a color, you can build a portal. There's no code, no HTML, no design decisions beyond your branding.
Can I preview a portal before publishing it?
Yes. Every portal has a private preview URL only you can see. Once you publish, it moves to its public URL.
What happens if I need to update the portal mid-year?
Log in, edit, save. Announcements, contacts, and pharmacy lists update immediately. If a plan changes and you need to re-upload documents, the review flow re-runs on just the new document, you don't rebuild from scratch.
About pricing
Is this priced per employee?
No. Every tier is a flat price per portal, regardless of how many employees the employer has. A 20-person company and a 500-person company pay the same for the same tier. Essentials and Professional cover employers up to 500 employees and Advanced covers up to 2,500; larger groups get a custom plan — contact us.
Do I need a credit card to start?
No. Every new account gets a free 30-day Professional portal — every Professional feature, with a 200-question Benny allowance and up to 15 documents (750 pages of processing) for the trial — no card required. Paid plans have no document limit.
Can I upgrade or downgrade later?
Yes, anytime. Move a portal from Essentials to Professional when a client wants Benny, or drop a tier if a client's needs get simpler. Changes are prorated.
How does volume pricing work for brokers?
It's a published rate card, not a percentage: bands at 10, 25, and 50 portals, with a per-portal monthly price for each tier (see the pricing page for the card). Every billed portal counts toward your band — monthly or annual, any tier — but the discounted rate itself applies to annual billing only; monthly is list price at any book size. No pack to buy, no promo code: qualifying annual checkouts show the band rate up front, and your existing annual portals move to the new rate at each one's renewal.
What happens if I cancel?
The portal goes offline and stops being accessible. Your setup and documents stay saved for 90 days in case you come back. After that, they're deleted.
Are there any usage fees or overage charges?
Each Benny tier includes a monthly question allowance, and Benny never stops answering mid-month when you pass it. Additional questions are metered at $25 per 1,000 and billed monthly in $25 increments — capped by a monthly spending limit you control (default $100; set it to $0 for no automatic charges at all). At the cap, Benny switches to showing the matching plan-document sections directly until the new month starts. Overage never rolls over; most months it's zero.
About Benny
Where do Benny's answers come from?
Only the plan documents uploaded to that specific portal. Not the internet. Not other companies' plans. Not the AI's general training data. If an employee asks a question and the answer isn't in the uploaded documents, Benny says so and points to the carrier.
Can Benny give medical or legal advice?
No. Benny is designed to find and summarize information from plan documents, not to advise. When asked "which plan should I pick" or "should I see a doctor," Benny explains it can only share what the documents say and points to the human contact who can help.
What if employees ask something Benny can't answer?
Benny says so plainly and points them to the relevant carrier contact or the HR team. Every answer, including "I don't know," ends with a real phone number they can call.
About security and privacy
Is my data secure?
Plan documents are stored in private, encrypted storage. Documents are only served through short-lived signed URLs. Draft data is visible only to the admin building the portal. See the security page for the full breakdown of how documents are handled.
Do you sell or share any data?
No. Ever.
Does Benny train on my documents?
No. Our AI provider processes the relevant sections of your plan documents to answer a question and then moves on. Your documents are not used to improve any AI model, not shared with other customers, and not retained beyond what's required to serve the request.
Can one client's portal see another client's data?
No. Portal data is isolated at the database layer, not just the interface. When Benny answers a question on Company A's portal, it's reading Company A's documents and nothing else.
Do you collect information about employees who visit the portal?
No personal information, and no employee accounts, email collection, or tracking pixels. We record anonymous page-view and Benny usage counts, and we store the questions people type to Benny with a random session ID — never tied to anyone's identity — so the benefits team can see what topics come up. No individual employee is ever identifiable.
Can the site be password protected?
Yes, optionally, on every plan. You can set one shared password for your whole benefits site from the Settings tab — employees enter it once and stay signed in for about six months, with no accounts and no email collection. It keeps the site off Google and away from strangers; it's not meant to stop employees from sharing it with family. Most sites don't need it: benefits information is already disclosed openly, which is why sites are public by default.
Are you HIPAA or SOC 2 certified?
Neither framework applies to how this product works. Benefits Studio publishes information the employer already discloses openly to every eligible employee, plan summaries, carrier contacts, deductibles, so we don't process, store, or transmit the kind of confidential data those frameworks were built to protect. See the security page for the full explanation.
About the company
Who built Benefits Studio?
Rick Ramos, formerly on the founding team at HealthJoy, one of the largest employer benefits navigation platforms. The About page has the full story.
How big is Benefits Studio?
Benefits Studio is built and run intentionally lean so it can stay affordable to the small and mid-market employers who've been priced out of modern benefits tools for years. You may get the founder directly when you email support.
How long has this been around?
Benefits Studio launched in 2026. The problem it solves is decades old and our team has decades of experience solving these challenges.
Do you offer a partner program for brokers?
Volume pricing kicks in automatically at 10, 25, and 50 portals (see the rate card on the pricing page). For general agencies or brokerages looking for a formal partnership beyond that, contact us and we'll set up a call.