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What a trigger is made of

Every trigger has four parts:
  • Instructions — the playbook Swan follows every time the trigger fires. This is the same kind of instruction you’d type in chat, written once and reused for every event.
  • Toolkits — the set of tools Swan is allowed to use while carrying out those instructions (CRM actions, enrichment, outreach, and so on).
  • A source — the trigger type, which determines what kind of event starts a run. See the other pages in this section for the available sources (schedule, webhook, app events, HubSpot workflow, LinkedIn engagement, business events, Bombora intent, website visitors, and message received — the reply trigger created for you when you connect a sending account).
  • Enabled or disabled — a trigger only fires while it’s enabled. Disabling it stops new runs without deleting the trigger or its history.
You can also tag triggers with free-form labels to organize them (add or remove tags directly from a trigger’s row on Triggers), and a trigger can be scoped to just you (a personal trigger) or shared across your organization — pick which from the New trigger dropdown on that same page.

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From fire to run

Every time a trigger’s source produces a qualifying event, Swan records that event and starts a fresh agent run that follows the trigger’s instructions. Each run is independent — it doesn’t carry over memory or state from a previous run of the same trigger, aside from anything Swan has saved to org knowledge or memory.

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Credits

Before starting any run, Swan checks whether your organization has credits remaining. If you’re out of credits:
  • The run is blocked and doesn’t execute.
  • The trigger itself is not disabled or paused — it keeps listening for new events.
  • As soon as credits are available again (for example, after your plan renews or you add more), the next event the trigger receives runs normally. Events that fired while you were out of credits don’t get retried automatically once credits return — the run for that specific event is simply skipped.
Each trigger source has a flat per-event fee, typically 1–2 credits, charged when the event is processed — on top of that, the run itself spends credits on whatever actions it takes (enrichment, sending messages, CRM writes, and so on). See credits for how action costs work.

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Who can create and edit triggers

By default, only organization admins can create, edit, or delete triggers; other members can view triggers but not change them. This is a configurable permission, so your organization may have opened it up more broadly — see roles and permissions. There’s no way to manually fire an existing trigger on demand outside of its normal source — if you want Swan to do the same work right now, ask it directly in chat, or (for webhook triggers) send a test request to the trigger’s URL.

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Testing before you turn a trigger on

Before enabling a trigger, you can ask Swan to simulate it against a hypothetical scenario — for example, “simulate this trigger for a CFO at a 500-person SaaS company who just raised funding.” Swan runs a read-only pass using the trigger’s instructions and your organization’s context (ICP, skills, CRM data) and returns what it predicts it would do, step by step, without actually taking any action or spending action credits. This is a good way to catch instructions that are ambiguous or would do something unexpected before real events start flowing through it.

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Common questions

Can I pause a trigger without deleting it? Yes — disable it, either from the toggle on its row in Triggers or from the Active/Disabled toggle at the top of the trigger’s own page. Disabled triggers keep their configuration and history; they just stop starting new runs until you re-enable them. What happens to events that arrive while a trigger is disabled? They aren’t processed and aren’t queued for later — a disabled trigger simply isn’t listening. Can members create their own personal triggers? Creating a personal trigger requires the same trigger-create permission as an organization-wide trigger — by default, admins only. There’s no separate, more permissive setting for personal triggers. Does simulating a trigger cost credits? No — simulations use read-only tools and don’t spend the action credits a real run would.