Frequently asked questions

Some will. We won't print a percentage, because we would be guessing, and you would rightly not believe it. What we can tell you is what moves it: writing to small firms where your email reaches an actual decision maker rather than a portal, opening with something true and specific about them, and following up once. A dozen careful emails will beat two hundred identical ones, every time.

It is completely normal, and in the UK it has a name: a spontaneous application. Most small firms never advertise internships at all. They take someone on when a good person asks at a moment when they happen to need help. You are not interrupting a process; usually there isn't one.

That is the thing we work hardest on. Every email is built from what your target company actually says on its own site, so it carries a detail no template could. We also strip the tells: no em dashes, no hyphenated compounds, none of the stock phrases ("I hope this finds you well", "I am impressed by", "passionate about"). You should still read it and make it sound like you, because you know things we don't.

Yes, always, and nothing sends until you approve it. You see every draft, edit any of it, and skip the companies you don't fancy. Even on automatic sending, you approve the batch first. There is no setting anywhere that mails a stranger without you having read it.

That is the normal starting position, and it matters less than you think. A small firm is not comparing you to a graduate with two internships; they are deciding whether a keen person is worth a few weeks of their time. What works is reasoning from what you have actually done, a society you ran, a model you built, a shift you worked, to something they need. Nearside writes that reasoning for you rather than listing your CV back at them.

Your own. You connect your mailbox and mail goes out from your address, so replies land in your inbox and the relationship is yours, not ours. We never send from a shared Nearside domain, which is the thing that gets student outreach filed as spam. Works with Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and Yahoo, and with university, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 addresses. Pro connects two mailboxes and Max connects three, so a bigger week's sending is split between them rather than landing on one address.

Fewer than you would guess, and better. Fifteen to twenty five firms you would genuinely want to spend a summer with, sent over a couple of weeks with one follow up each, will beat two hundred identical ones. Your weekly credits are how many emails we write for you, not a target to hit. When we send them for you we never go above 30 a day from any one address, because past that mail providers start filing you as junk, and that is exactly why Pro splits a busier week across two inboxes and Max across three.

Reply yourself, quickly, from your own inbox, because that is where it landed. When you send from your own connected inbox, Nearside notices the reply and stops the follow ups for that company automatically, so nobody gets chased after saying yes. You can also mark a reply yourself at any time. From there it is a normal conversation, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Job boards show you the roles that are advertised, which is the small, crowded end of the market. Every listing you can see, several thousand other students can see too. Most internships at smaller firms are never posted anywhere. Cold email is how you reach the ones that are not on any board, before anyone is competing for them.

Those are built for sales teams sending thousands of near identical emails a day, and they are priced for a company's budget rather than a student's. Nearside caps you deliberately, sources local small firms rather than corporate contact lists, and writes for a student asking to learn rather than a rep trying to close. There is a full comparison below.

Genuinely free, no card. You get one company search a day, up to ten real local firms, with researched emails you can send from your own inbox. It is a usable product, not a demo that stops at the interesting part. AI rewriting and automatic sending are the paid additions.

The number of emails we write for you in a week, resetting every seven days. Sending is not separately counted. Free gives you 25 a week, Starter 100, Pro 250, Max 500. If that sounds low, read the answer above about how many you should actually send.

Only for automatic sending. Your provider gives you an app specific password, which is a code just for us that you can revoke any time without touching your real password. It is encrypted at rest and used only to send your emails and check for replies. You can skip it entirely and send the drafts yourself from your own mail app.

Your inbox password is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is stored, and card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us. Your CV sits in a private file store and is used for two things: it is attached to your first email to each company, and if you use CV auto fill it is sent once to Google's Gemini so your bio and skills can be read out of it. Skip auto fill and no AI provider ever sees it. Everything travels over TLS and the database is encrypted at rest. See the Privacy Policy for the detail.

Yes, from your account page, in one click. You keep what you have paid for until the end of the period and you are not billed again. There is no phone call and nobody tries to talk you out of it.

No tool can promise that, and you should be suspicious of one that does. What it does is put a genuinely good, genuinely personal email in front of the right small companies, which is the part you can control. The rest is you.