Elfa’s Q3 update adds research workspaces and editable automations

What changed in Elfa’s research tools

Elfa’s September 29 recap describes Workspace for persistent research and Automation Canvas for editable workflows. Its quarterly recap also describes new templates, broader US equities support and additional triggers covering sentiment, derivatives, social activity and regulatory updates. These additions concern organising research and responding to market information.

September 29 dates the recap, not necessarily each feature’s launch. The report describes progress during the quarter rather than a single coordinated rollout.

Choose the event you actually want to detect

A trigger is the condition that must be met before an automation runs its configured action. Elfa’s trigger documentation distinguishes a post by a named X account, a message in a monitored public Telegram channel, a broader news event and an official securities filing. These are different evidence sources, even when they concern the same company.

For example, a company posting about a filing is not the same event as the filing appearing in the regulatory record. Elfa’s filing source identifies the issuer through its US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) identifier, rather than its stock ticker. Its social-post triggers require the account or public channel to be monitored; the documentation does not promise coverage of every account.

Timing also depends on the source. The follow-graph reference explains that X follows are collected through recurring checks, not a live stream, and that unfollows are not detected. A workflow labelled real-time therefore still needs its specific input’s coverage and timing understood.

Decide when the monitoring should stop or repeat

Elfa’s query model separates the condition, the action and the expiry window. By default, a plan fires once and finishes. A repeating plan instead includes a cooldown, the minimum gap between activations, and a maximum number of activations. An expiry window limits how long the plan remains relevant.

Imagine monitoring several distinct announcements during a short review period. A repeating event plan can address that intention, while a one-shot plan stops after the first match. A fixed calendar schedule answers a different question: run at the chosen times, whether or not a new announcement has just appeared. The documentation does not allow repeat to be combined with recurring schedule conditions. Validate the chosen plan before creating it.

Make sure the alert reaches the right place

A correct trigger is only part of a useful workflow. Elfa’s notification guide describes Telegram delivery for readable alerts, webhooks for sending an event to another service, and Server-Sent Events, or SSE, for applications that listen through an open connection. A webhook is a message delivered to a configured software destination when an event occurs.

For an initial human review process, the important check is that a received alert explains what happened and why you requested it. Elfa includes the query title and description in notifications. A software integration also needs to verify incoming events and recognise duplicates before performing downstream work. The SSE documentation explicitly says its events are live-only, with no replay after a disconnected period. Receiving an alert and completing an action are separate outcomes.

Check API access and costs separately from the app

The official application programming interface (API) pricing page checked on September 29 lists a free tier with 1,000 monthly credits, but excludes Agent Chat and Agent Automation from that tier. Grow is listed at $290 per month with 40,000 credits and includes those capabilities; Enterprise has custom terms. These are API plans, not a price list for every Workspace or app feature.

The same page lists pay-per-use access at $0.0145 per credit, with a $20 minimum prepaid top-up for API-key access. The page’s lower transitional rate for existing prepaid accounts ended on September 28 at 16:00 UTC. A request can consume multiple credits, so a credit price is not automatically a price per request. Elfa also states that app plans consume credits differently. Check the access route and actual consumption before projecting a workflow’s cost.

What remains on the roadmap

The recap lists v3 endpoints and Explore as upcoming. It does not restore the retired Trade page.