Printables product
The product frame around the household printables engine. The engine itself and the activity library live at ~/rdco-vault/01-projects/life/printables/README.md; this folder holds the commercial and roadmap thinking layered on top of it.
Where it stands
Business analysis update, 2026-09-11: [[2026-09-11-business-opportunity-pricing-and-acquisition]] consolidates the TAM scenarios, live model-cost observations, supplies-store economics, corpus-reuse thesis, and bootstrap pricing/acquisition proposals. Pricing remains provisional. The older status and numbers below describe the August planning baseline; do not treat them as current measured economics.
Step-1 scope is APPROVED (founder ruling 2026-08-30 evening). Kill criteria are DORMANT until the founder declares the catalog launched - the clock does not run during development. The frame has since widened from one rung to a standing studio targeting tiers 1-4 of the trust ladder, with Cloudflare as the platform and generation staying local on the founder's Max subscription until volume forces the API.
Open with the founder on the charter page: accept-or-amend the charter, pick a name, greenlight the nightly studio cron.
Settled on the same evening and folded into the charter after publishing: the ACCOUNT MODEL is adult-first and household-scoped ("a curated education plan or tutor, packaged up as print-off games"), and every pack's first page is a parent-facing overview of what the child will learn.
Contents
[[2026-09-11-business-opportunity-pricing-and-acquisition]] — current provisional business assessment, pricing and CAC scenarios, observed Cloudflare costs, supplies store, and validation milestones; related GitHub issue #149.
[[2026-08-31-studio-charter]] - the studio org (product/design/engineering/growth + critic gate map), Cloudflare architecture for tiers 1-4, unit-cost model on Max vs API with break-even at three price points, domain-availability shortlist, child-profile sketch. Live decision page: https://hq.raydata.co/decisions/2026-08-31-printables-studio-charter.html
[[2026-08-30-step1-memo]] - step-1 scope, tech spec, business sniff test, pre-registered kill criteria. Live decision page: https://hq.raydata.co/decisions/2026-08-30-printables-product-step1-memo.html. Amended 2026-08-31: kill-criteria section reworded to dormant-until-launch (founder ruling C); the brand one-way-door line softened to an expensive door.
Numbers worth remembering
- Tier-1 hosting is $0.00/month, inside Cloudflare free tiers - not "pennies," as the step-1 memo estimated unsourced.
- The first real bill is a flat $5.00/month Workers Paid floor at rung 2.
- Modeled API cost per 7-page custom pack: $0.71 on claude-sonnet-5 (band $0.35-$1.45), $1.78 on claude-opus-5, which is what the 2026-08-30 packs actually ran on.
- Break-even against founder time (2 hrs/wk at a placeholder $150/hr = $1,300/mo): 300-900 subscribers. Against infrastructure alone: 3-4 customers, which is true and almost meaningless.
- Only candidate name with a clean .com out of fifteen: Table Pages.
- Two finalists, both with a for-sale .com and no price obtained: Little Press (Atom listing) and Scribble Works (GoDaddy NameFind lander).
- The separator is existing use, not domains: The Little Press, LLC is an active NJ children's book publisher with 2025 trade-press coverage. Scribble Works has softer collisions (Ghanaian edtech on .tech; a 1999 USPTO filing abandoned 2002) plus a free
.co. Neither is trademark-cleared. - Adult-first accounts force the child profile server-side from tier 2; the reviewed draft's local-first guarantee is given up.
Related
- [[~/rdco-vault/01-projects/life/printables/README.md]] - the engine, library, and founder rulings
- [[~/rdco-vault/01-projects/life/printables/2026-08-30-printables-inspiration-research.md]] - developmental and catalog-taxonomy research
- 2026-08-02 kids-books-Shopify wedge decision - overlapping consumer-product surface