Brevo holds two jobs that both drift. Contact attributes fill in inconsistently across imports and forms, so the same field reads three ways. Email template copy ages, the tone wanders between templates, and a subject line you wrote a year ago no longer matches the rest. Fixing either by hand means clicking through contacts and templates one at a time, which is why the cleanup never happens.
Scratch pulls your contacts and templates down as files on your computer. Your AI standardizes the attributes, tightens the prose, and rewrites the template copy across the whole set, not a sample. Every change comes back as a word-level diff next to the original, and nothing reaches Brevo until you approve it. Your mailing lists themselves never move.
Scratch is the companion app to Whalesync. Whalesync keeps your tools in sync; Scratch is where you clean the contact data and tighten the copy first, so what syncs out is already right.
What Scratch edits in Brevo
- Contact attributes (text and rich text, plus dates, booleans, and multi-choice)
- Contact list membership and blacklist flags
- Email template copy: subject, body, sender, reply-to, active status, and template tags
How it works
- Scratch pulls your contacts and templates into files. Your Brevo contacts and email templates come down to a folder on your laptop, one file per record, with their attributes, list membership, blacklist flags, and template copy. Nothing touches the live account.
- Your AI edits the fields you point it at. Open the folder in the agent you already use. Try a prompt on a few records, then let it run across the whole set. Standardize the contact attributes, tighten the prose, rewrite the template subject and body. The mailing lists themselves are read-only: list names, IDs, and membership rules do not move. Email addresses and contact IDs stay untouched.
- You review every diff and publish. In the Scratch desktop app, each changed field shows next to the original, word by word. Approve what ships, and Scratch syncs only the records you approved back through the Brevo API.
What teams use it for
- Standardize contact attributes after an import, so the same field reads the same way for everyone.
- Rewrite email template copy in one consistent tone across a set of templates.
- Tighten subject lines and body prose that aged or wandered off-voice.
- Update the sender, reply-to, or active status across a batch of templates in one reviewed pass.
- Clean up list membership and blacklist flags, without ever moving the lists themselves.
- Roll back a template rewrite or an attribute change, per record, when a pass went wrong.
Why not let AI write straight to Brevo?
A direct API write or an MCP server hands the AI the publish button straight to your live account. There is no diff, no review queue, no rollback. One confident pass can rewrite a subject line across every template or flip attributes on thousands of contacts, and a bad template edit ships to your next send before anyone reads it. By the time you spot the wrong tone or the wrong fact, it is already live and the original is often gone.
Scratch gives the AI the same access, but against a local copy of your contacts and templates. The write-back step is pulled out and handed to you. The agent can change anything in the copy, only you commit it, and Scratch writes back only the fields you changed, so the mailing lists, email addresses, contact IDs, and the fields you did not touch stay exactly as they were. Every record Scratch writes back is reversible on its own.
What's safe, and what's locked
The mailing lists themselves are read-only. List names, IDs, and membership rules do not move, and email addresses and contact IDs stay untouched. To be precise about the nuance: contact list membership and blacklist flags are editable, but the lists they point at are not. Read-only fields are stripped before write-back, so the agent cannot push them even if it edits the copy. You bring your own AI: Scratch holds no AI credentials and runs no model, so you sign into Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Cline, or Windsurf the way you already do. By default, nothing leaves your machine until you publish. Every published change is reversible per record. Optional Python validators, which the AI can author, flag edits that break a subject-length cap or touch a field you protected, right next to the diff.
Questions Brevo users ask
Can Scratch rename or restructure my mailing lists?
No. The mailing lists themselves are read-only. List names, IDs, and membership rules do not move. You can edit a contact's list membership and blacklist flags, but the lists those point at stay exactly as they are, and they are stripped before write-back so the agent cannot change them.
Will a template rewrite go live before I read it?
No. Every template change lands in local files first and shows next to the original as a word-level diff in the Scratch desktop app, subject and body included. You approve record by record, and Scratch syncs only the templates you approved back through the Brevo API. A validator can also flag an over-length subject before you approve.
Does Scratch touch my contacts' email addresses?
No. Email addresses and contact IDs stay untouched. Scratch edits contact attributes, list membership, and blacklist flags, but the address and ID on each contact are left exactly as they were.
Can I undo a change after it has synced back to Brevo?
Yes. Every record Scratch writes back is reversible on its own. Roll back one contact or template, or a whole run, and Scratch restores the original for you to publish.
See it on your own Brevo
Pull your contacts and templates into files and watch the AI tighten one template or standardize one attribute, then publish only what you approve.