A red error bubble is a dead end. A Tips popup is a doorway.
Until this release, when Arka's backend returned a 500 or hit a timeout, you saw a bright red message in the chat that said “Server error (HTTP 500).” Accurate. Useless. We replaced it.
The new Tips popup
Now when Arka cannot answer, a small centred popup appears titled Tips. The body explains what likely went wrong in plain language — “Arka is experiencing high traffic right now” or “That request took longer than expected” — and offers two buttons: Got it to dismiss, and Upgrade to go straight to the pricing page.
The popup is smart enough to pick the message based on the error type. Rate limits, timeouts, network failures, and generic 500s each get their own copy. You always know why something failed, not just that it did.
Only on errors, never on success
One thing that bugged us about Kimi, which inspired this pattern: Kimi shows the Tips popup even on successful messages, nudging you to subscribe every few minutes. That feels coercive. Ours only fires on actual failures. You will never see it after a clean response.
Combined with our cache pipeline, this means the rare error you do see is immediately actionable, and the next deploy that fixes the underlying problem reaches you within minutes.