First 30 days on Tracelight if you've been doing this in a doc + tabs.
Plenty of investigators do OSINT manually — Google + LinkedIn + a Google doc to take notes + 30 browser tabs open. Tracelight collapses that to a single dashboard with structured findings. Here's what the first month looks like in practice.
What you're doing today
The pattern is consistent across investigators we've talked to who run OSINT manually: case + subject context lives in a Google Doc or a case-management tool. Actual investigation happens in browser tabs (LinkedIn, PACER, OFAC search, breach lookup sites, social media). Findings get pasted back into the doc as text + screenshots. Reports get assembled at the end by re-reading the doc + reformatting.
This works. It's also slow, error-prone, and produces work product that's hard to defend in deposition. Most investigators who run this workflow recognize all three.
What changes in week 1
You sign up at trytracelight.com (60 seconds). You complete the 3-step onboarding (use case, demo case, run-your-first-lookup). You're now looking at a dashboard with a real subject and real evidence rows.
Week 1 isn't about replacing your existing workflow — it's about learning Tracelight's shape. Most investigators run their first 3-5 cases in parallel: do them manually like they always do, then run them through Tracelight after to compare. The Tracelight version is consistently faster + finds more (multi-source verification surfaces things the manual workflow misses) + audit-trailed.
What changes in week 2-3
You start running cases in Tracelight first instead of manually. The doc + tabs combo becomes the supporting workflow rather than the primary one. Your end-of-case report generation collapses from a half-day re-reading and formatting exercise to a 30-second click + signed PDF.
You probably set up your first integration around now — Slack alerts most commonly, so when a monitored subject's profile changes you find out in your investigations channel without checking the dashboard.
What changes in week 4
Your manual workflow's gone. The doc + tabs combo is deprecated. New cases start in Tracelight; the report is the deliverable; the audit log is the chain of custody.
The realization most investigators have at this point: the bottleneck on case throughput was never the OSINT speed — it was the report-assembly step. Collapsing that step to seconds means you can run 2-3x more cases per week without working more hours. That's the actual ROI.
What stays the same
Your investigative judgment. Tracelight surfaces evidence, scores it, presents it cited; deciding what's material is still your job.
Your client relationship. Tracelight is your tooling, not your business. Sales, scoping, client communication, deliverable formatting beyond the PDF report — all still yours.
Your specialized workflows. Some PIs have niche workflows (e.g., a specific local-court database your jurisdiction uses) that Tracelight doesn't cover. The doc + tabs combo for those specific lookups doesn't go away; it just covers less of the total workflow.