Bold Little Oracle — Offer Ladder (One-Pager)

The full ladder, each rung honest against the paywall promise: “No subscription. No games. No tracking. One price, forever.”

The frame for every offering: “Your unlock covers everything you’ve ever bought here, forever. The weekly card is a gift. New decks are new books — each one also one price, forever.”

Platform rule: everything stays Apple-as-merchant-of-record (non-consumable IAPs only) except the physical deck, which uses Stripe on the web because it must — no new payment platform unless a concept credibly clears €500/yr, and only the Paper Oracle ever does.

Rung 0 — Free Tier + The Week’s Card

• Price / IAP type: Free. No IAP.
• What the buyer gets: 1 deterministic daily card (gentle voice) + a free hand-written Week’s Card, same card for everyone, fetched on foreground open only. Fully functional offline (bundled deck is the permanent floor).
• Honesty reconciliation (public language): “The weekly card is a gift. Free for everyone, forever.” And on tracking: “No accounts. No analytics. No trackers. The app fetches one small public card file — the same file for everyone. Our server counts how many times that file was asked for — a number, never a name. We can’t see who you are or what you drew, and we don’t want to.”
• Launch timing: v1.2 (one binary, one review cycle, ~3–5 weeks post-v1.1 approval). The claim surgery ships in the same release.
• Revenue: €0 direct. This is the distribution engine and the measurement sensor (weekly-open gate ≥30% of trailing-90-day installs).

Rung 1 — Lifetime Unlock

• Price / IAP type: €6.99 non-consumable (existing SKU, untouched). Nets ~€4.99 DE with Small Business Program.
• What the buyer gets: Unlimited draws, Sassy voice, all app features, every future improvement to any of them, the First Printing archive. Never re-scoped, never shrunk, nothing existing ever moves behind a new gate. Retired cards never vanish from the device.
• Honesty reconciliation (public language): The paywall line stays literally true and untouched. Listing updates to: “the hand-written 72-card base deck — plus a free new hand-written card every week.”
• Launch timing: v1.1 (submitted; in App Review as of 2026-07-16).
• Revenue: see table below.

Rung 2 — The Missing Cards

• Price / IAP type: €4.99 non-consumable (nets ~€3.56 DE).
• What the buyer gets: 20 new hand-written cards for the hard days: money fear, grief, heartbreak, waiting-on-an-outcome, real forks, failure that already happened, family duty. Both voices (sassy-grief register decided and outside-reader-tested before writing). Lifetime holders see it 1 week early + 2 free preview cards.
• Honesty reconciliation (public language, the entitlement screen shown before the buy button): “Your lifetime unlock covers everything you’ve ever bought here, forever — this app, the 72 cards, Sassy, all of it. This is a new deck. New cards, new work. Also one price, forever.”
• Launch timing: Month 2–3, gated: weekly-open ≥30% for 4 consecutive weeks by day 60 post-v1.2. Writing proceeds regardless; launch waits for the gate. Ships with the listing relaunch: “92 hand-written cards, including the ones for the hard days.”
• Revenue: attach underwritten at 15–20% of cumulative unlockers + ~0.5% of free installs.

Rung 3 — One Seasonal Pack per Year, Maximum

• Price / IAP type: €2.99–3.99 non-consumable (nets ~€2.12–2.83).
• What the buyer gets: One seasonal hand-written deck (e.g. The Dark Half, October). One per year, hard maximum — no quarterly cadence, ever.
• Honesty reconciliation (public language): Same entitlement-screen sentence as Rung 2 — every new deck is “also one price, forever.” Seasonal ≠ expiring: the pack never disappears once bought.
• Launch timing: October earliest, gated: Missing Cards ≥5 buyers in its first 60 days (≥5 in 30 days = outperform signal, may start early). At low scale this gate realistically stays shut — that is correct, not failure.
• Revenue: €0 below ~2,000 installs (gate stays shut).

Rung 4 — The Paper Oracle

• Price / IAP type: €29–34 physical deck, web checkout (Stripe) — no IAP, zero Apple cut. ~€12 target margin/deck (verified only once the landed-cost sheet exists), recognized only at delivery.
• What the buyer gets: Printed 72-card deck, gentle front / sassy flip.
• Honesty reconciliation (public language): It’s a physical product outside the app; the app promise is untouched. Preorder terms state the estimated ship date and a full-refund-on-request path before delivery; 14-day Widerrufsrecht runs from physical delivery. Preorder cash is a refundable liability (not margin) until decks ship; USt on Anzahlungen is set aside and remitted in the period received.
• Launch timing: Waitlist page (email only) now → paid preorders only after ≥25 waitlist emails AND verified EU landed-cost sheet AND LUCID/Verpackungsgesetz registration → production only at ≥10 paid preorders by Dec 1, else the page comes down.
• Revenue: Christmas-weighted, mid-scale and up only.

LATER (gated, never in-app)

• Obadiah’s Letter (free monthly): list ≥300. Paid patronage (Patreon, MoR): only after 3 consecutive free letters + list ≥300 + disclosure-posture doc; never mentioned in-app — so “No subscription. Ever.” stays true of the app, literally.

Revenue Math — 100 / 500 / 2,000 installs (cumulative, day 90)

Shared assumptions: install→unlock 2% provisional (replaced by the week-2 ASC number before any re-run); lifetime nets €4.99 DE; Missing Cards nets ~€3.56, attach 15–20% of unlockers + ~0.5% of free installs; below 500 installs use absolute counts, not rates.

The honest read: none of this pays for the hours. What pays: (a) listing-conversion lift from “hand-written cards including grief and money” (tested via PPO); (b) a catalog where every object compounds the brand; (c) the share loop + Sunday @boldlittleoracle post — the only thing attacking the install bottleneck. Distribution first, catalog second, patronage maybe-never.

KILLED — deleted, not deferred. Do not relitigate.

1. Paid/generated “Live Oracle” subscription (news-reactive cards behind a subscription). Kills three promises at once: “No subscription. Ever.” dies the moment an auto-renewable SKU exists in the app; “Not AI-generated” dies because a daily/news-reactive cadence cannot be hand-written by one person; and it converts the brand’s core differentiator (a human wrote this) into exactly the AI-slop-horoscope category BLO exists to be against. The living-content need is met instead by the free hand-written Week’s Card.

2. The Ribbon / any streak mechanic. “No games” is on the paywall. Streaks are a retention game — loss-aversion pressure dressed as ritual, and a lie in a product whose whole voice says “tiny, small, today, no pressure.” Also punishes exactly the users on hard days that The Missing Cards serves. The deterministic daily draw gives ritual without a scoreboard.

3. Live “N people drew this” counters. Requires per-request telemetry granular enough to erode “No tracking” in spirit even if anonymized, injects social comparison into a private ritual, and at honest scale the number is embarrassing (“3 people drew this”) — anti-social-proof. The only counting that exists is the anonymous aggregate Worker (path, status-class, ISO-week), disclosed in the FAQ.

4. Roast Mode Preview (free teaser of the sassy voice as an upsell hook). It’s a game — a dangled taste engineered to convert — and it cheapens Sassy from “the same friend, two glasses of wine” into a marketing gimmick. The paywall converts on the promise, not on teasers. (Legit previews exist elsewhere: 2 free preview cards per pack, disclosed in the FAQ.)

5. Quarterly pack cadence + €8.99 four-pack bundle (and its B2B cousin, the Facilitator’s Deck). Quarterly cadence turns a one-time burst into a permanent second job that violates the hours-stack rule (the Sunday ritual is the only recurring commitment this portfolio can afford), and at 40 unlockers the bundle’s expected buyers round to zero — it adds SKU/entitlement complexity (the Moonly failure mode) for no revenue. B2B means invoicing, VAT-on-services, and a sales motion a solo Einzelunternehmer with a day job cannot staff. One flagship pack, one seasonal pack maximum per year, gates before every launch.

(Also dead, for the record: any in-app subscription of any kind, daily hand-written cadence, on-device debug-screen counter.)