06-reference/concepts

scribble works trust ladder

2026-09-06·reference
scribble-worksproduct-modelautomation-trust

The Scribble Works trust ladder

Four rungs of increasing automation, and the founder's rule that monetization and effort should key off rung, not off some separate pricing scheme:

  1. Rung 1 — manual playset building. No accounts, no queue, no bill. The founder builds by hand.
  2. Rung 2 — Customize one game. A parent types a sentence about their kid; the printed page is theirs. First moment behind a capped free account.
  3. Rung 3 — magic-wand auto-complete. The system fills in the rest of a playset from a seed.
  4. Rung 4 — fully generated playsets, scheduled delivery. Pre-filled from a child's profile and focus topics, delivered on a plan's schedule — the paid product, not a retention gimmick.

Push email/SMS is framed as the payoff of climbing the ladder (burnout prevention for the parent), not a growth mechanic bolted on top.

Why this is in the vault

The rung model is the load-bearing structure behind Scribble Works' engineering scope, pricing table, and privacy posture (e.g. profile goes server-side starting rung 2), but no single doc defined it on its own — it was implicit across four+ project docs, forcing each new spec to re-derive or restate it.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Reinforces RDCO's studio-charter discipline of keying irreversible decisions (pricing, ladder ordering, rung definitions) to founder authority while leaving engineering/product free to iterate inside a rung — see the product vs engineering authority split in [[2026-08-31-studio-charter]]. It also surfaces a live gap: several audits ([[A-architecture-code-quality]], [[B-security-abuse]]) found rung-gating defaults (GENERATIVE_REQUIRES_ACCOUNT, sign-in limiters) that fail open rather than fail closed at the rung-2 boundary — see [[2026-09-06-fail-open-vs-fail-closed-defaults]]. The ladder is also the reason [[2026-09-01-personal-shopper-spec]] became orphaned: it was renamed "the planner" post-rung-3 without any doc back-linking to the original spec.

Where this appears