The limit lasted about an hour on our whiteboard. Someone had written it in green: twelve courses a month, with a price next to it. It was clean, easy to say aloud and easy to put on a pricing page.
Then someone at the other end of the room asked a question. What about a person who builds one course and then rebuilds one chapter of it twenty times in a week? We wiped the green off and started looking for a way to count the work itself, not the number of courses.
A limit is wrong in both directions
Take a person who built three courses in a month and paid for twelve. Nine slots are wasted. Nobody refunds unused slots, and by the third month that customer has left, quietly, without writing to us first.
Now the opposite case. An author keeps editing a single course: he rewrote a chapter on Sunday, rebuilt the tasks, changed the list of topics, rebuilt the tasks again. By a course counter his limit ran out weeks ago, although EvoluteMe did less work for him than for one course built from scratch. He leaves too, sooner and much more loudly.
Both cases have the same cause. A course is not a unit of work. One course is pasted in from a clean manual. Another is squeezed out of a vague idea over three rebuilds. They cost very different amounts to produce, and a limit treats them as equal.
What actually gets counted
Lessons are free on every plan, including the free one. A chapter, a task and the check of your answer are what people came for, and we do not want to be a business that meters them.
Points pay for the work the model does: building a course, reworking a chapter, a talk with the mentor about a task, reading a lesson aloud in the model's voice, a bank of drill tasks written for you, and going through a photographed solution. A course from the marketplace is on that list too, at the price its author set. In other words, you pay for things that cost real money every time they happen, not for being in our database this month.
There is a consequence we do not enjoy. Someone who uses the workshop a lot pays more than someone who comes once a month. That is fair, but it sells worse than the word "unlimited" on a competitor's page.
The reserve, and the points that come back
Nobody knows the exact cost of an operation before it runs, and neither do we. It depends on how much material there is and how much work it turns out to need.
So before the work starts we hold points at the top estimate, and when it finishes we charge the real cost. The difference returns to the wallet automatically. You do not have to request it. The return appears in the log as a separate line, so you can see it.
The hold exists for one reason: an operation must not stop halfway. A course built up to the middle and abandoned is worse than a course that was never started, because you have to read it to find where it stops making sense. That is also why a small debt is allowed. If the work costs a little more than the hold, it still finishes and the wallet goes slightly below zero. The chapter does not break off mid sentence.
A log instead of a promise
The log shows who spent points, when, and on what. It is not a management report and not a way to watch an employee. It answers the question everyone asks after paying for something: where did it go?
We deliberately did not build a pretty summary with charts here. A line for each operation is more useful. You can see what rebuilding that chapter on Sunday actually cost and decide whether the next rebuild is worth it.
What costs nothing at all
The clearest way to explain the accounting is to list what it leaves out.
Lessons are free, the first of the day and the twentieth alike. Going back over old material is free too, and that is a matter of principle. If repetition cost points, people would start saving on it, and repetition is half of learning.
Checks are free, both the one at the start and the ones along the way. A drill gives out its daily portion for free. Checking a photographed solution does spend points, because recognising the handwriting and going through the working line by line is real work done for you.
A course by another author costs as many points as that author asked for, and the larger part goes to the author. On Basic and Extended you pay for such a course with the plan's points. On the free plan you pay with the trial pack. Once the trial pack is spent, you pay with points you bought, and those do not expire while you make up your mind.
Why not simply charge by the month
A subscription is simpler than a limit and more honest, but it has a flaw too: it punishes people who study irregularly.
Someone who studies in bursts pays for the months when they were away. An author who built two courses in January and came back in May either paid for four empty months or cancelled and lost the thread. Neither is something we want a person to remember us for.
We wanted a wallet you top up and then forget about until you need it. The free plan starts with a trial pack, so nobody has an empty wallet on the first evening. Points you buy stay yours and never expire. The points that come with a plan reset at the end of the month. People misread this part most often, so we say it twice on the pricing page.
One wallet in a company
A company has a shared wallet with a cap for each person. The cap stops one enthusiastic manager from emptying the budget on a Thursday evening. The company sets it itself and does not need to agree it with us.
Study targets are a completely separate thing. A team measure such as four study days a week is set for the team, and the result goes to the group lead, not to each employee. We separated them deliberately: spending is about money, studying is about a person at work, and mixing the two turns learning into reporting.
When the points run out
Nothing dramatic happens. This is the part we most wanted to get right.
Lessons continue. The route is still there, repetitions still come up, and the drill still gives out its portion. What stops is the part of the product that makes new material for you, until there are points in the wallet again.
Nothing you have already built is locked. A course you built stays yours and still opens when the wallet is empty.
Can the points run out halfway through an operation? No. The estimate is held before the work begins, and a small debt covers the case where the real cost is higher. You get a finished piece of work, not half of one.
The part we cannot do yet
There is no card payment today. An administrator issues a plan by hand, and the payment provider is next in the queue after the work we are doing now. We did not write "pay with any card" on the site, because anyone would find out it was untrue in about fifteen seconds.
The second gap is something we honestly do not know. We do not know what a normal monthly balance looks like for someone who studies every evening, because nobody has done that yet. When we find out, we will publish it. That includes the case where counting by work turns out to feel worse than a limit and we have to think again.
