Course 0 · Foundation
FreeNo account, no email
Decision Economics, Risk & Kill Criteria
- 12-month cost model
- Unit economics & payback
- Kill / freeze / pivot criteria
- All 6 lessons unlocked
Two courses free Escalating ladder
Pricing: start free, pay more only as the decisions get more expensive
Course 0 and Course 1 cost nothing, forever. From Course 2 onward every course costs more than the one before it. That is not a trick — it tracks the size of the mistake each course is designed to prevent.
Read this before anything else: the checkout is not real
This is a static, front-end-only demonstration site. There is no server, no payment provider and no account. When you press an unlock button, a flag is written to IndexedDB in your own browser and nothing is charged or transmitted. Anyone can read every lesson in the page source.
A production version of this ladder must put a real payment provider and server-side entitlement checks in front of paid lessons. Client-side gating is a user-experience pattern, never a security boundary. This page says so plainly because the academy's own editorial policy forbids implying a capability the build does not have.
The full ladder
Thirteen courses. Two free, eleven paid, each priced above the last. Buy them one at a time as you reach them, or take the bundle.
Course 1 · Foundation
FreeNo account, no email
Search Foundations in the AI/Zero-Click Era
- How zero-click actually works
- Query classes that survive
- Zero-click survival scorecard
- All 6 lessons unlocked
Bundle
$399All 13 courses · save $509
Full academy bundle
- 78 lessons, 78 artifacts
- All 12 tools & 7 v2 templates
- Capstone 3-site portfolio review
- Every future v2.x update
Course-by-course prices
| # | Course | What it decides | Price | Step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Decision Economics, Risk & Kill Criteria | Whether the site should exist at all | Free | — |
| 1 | Search Foundations in the AI/Zero-Click Era | Which demand is still worth chasing | Free | — |
| 2 | Niche Research & Displacement-Adjusted Selection | Which three markets you launch | $19 | +$19 |
| 3 | Owned Audience & the Newsletter as Product | Whether you own the relationship | $29 | +$10 |
| 4 | Architecture, Cloudflare & the Legal Launch Gate | What you publish before counsel review | $39 | +$10 |
| 5 | Technical SEO, Performance & Ops | Whether the asset is machine-legible | $49 | +$10 |
| 6 | Answer-Engine Visibility & Brand Demand | Whether you get cited when not clicked | $59 | +$10 |
| 7 | Content, E-E-A-T & Editorial Economics | Cost per asset and who signs it off | $69 | +$10 |
| 8 | On-Page, CRO & Tool UX | Whether attention converts | $79 | +$10 |
| 9 | APIs, Analytics & AI-Surface Measurement | What you can actually prove | $99 | +$20 |
| 10 | Links, Partnerships & Digital PR | Whether anyone vouches for you | $119 | +$20 |
| 11 | Monetization, Compliance & Resilience | How you take money and what you are liable for | $149 | +$30 |
| 12 | Capstone: the 3-Site Portfolio | What you keep, prune or kill | $199 | +$50 |
Why the price escalates
1. Price tracks the cost of the mistake
Getting Course 2 wrong costs you a few weeks in a bad niche. Getting Course 11 wrong can mean an FTC disclosure problem, a clawed-back affiliate account or a single sponsor who is 60% of revenue walking away. The later courses are cheap relative to what they prevent.
2. It enforces the order
A flat price invites people to jump to the monetisation course on day one and build a business on a niche that a generated answer will erase. The ladder makes the cheapest path the correct path: decide, then validate, then build, then monetise.
3. The free tier is genuinely enough to say no
Courses 0 and 1 exist so you can reach a defensible no without paying. If the 12-month cost model and the zero-click survival scorecard tell you the project fails, you have saved money and you owe us nothing. That is the honest outcome for a large share of readers.
Governing question
If Google disappeared tomorrow, why would anyone still come back to this brand? Every paid course on this ladder has to move that answer forward. If a course cannot, it should not be in the ladder — and the Month 3, 6 and 9 pruning gates apply to our own curriculum too.
What every paid course contains
There is one fixed spine, so the price differences are about subject leverage, not about size.
- 6 lessons
- 1 lab per lesson
- 1 artifact per lesson
- 1 scenario assessment
- 1 final project
- 1 checklist
- 1 AI-agent prompt
Free preview on every paid course
Lesson 1 of every paid course is readable in full before you unlock anything, including its lab and its artifact spec. You can see the format, the depth and the tone before deciding.
Locked lessons are never removed from the page. They stay in the document and in the accessibility tree, faded behind a visible unlock panel — no hidden focusable controls, and nothing disappears for crawlers or screen readers.
Your data stays yours
Progress, notes, artifacts and unlock state are written to IndexedDB on your own device. There is no account and no analytics account attached to your learning record.
Clearing site data clears your progress, so export a JSON backup from My progress before you do.
Pricing questions
Do I have to buy the courses in order?
No, but the ladder is designed so that buying out of order is both more expensive and less useful. Course 11 assumes you already have the niche score from Course 2 and the cost model from Course 0.
What happens to my unlock if I clear my browser data?
In this demonstration build, it is gone — entitlements live in IndexedDB with everything else. Export a backup from the dashboard first. In a production build this would be tied to a server-side account instead.
Is there a refund policy?
There is no checkout, so there is nothing to refund. If this were a live product, the policy that matches the ladder would be a full refund within 14 days on any single course, with the free tier serving as the trial.
Why is Course 12 the most expensive when it has the same six lessons?
Because it decides what you shut down. The capstone runs the Month 3, 6 and 9 pruning gates across three live sites and forces a keep/prune/kill call on each. Capital-allocation decisions are where the money in this whole curriculum actually is.
Are the prices claims that expire?
Prices are our own commercial terms, not third-party claims, so Rule 1's 90-day claim expiry does not apply to them. Every external platform, CPM or compliance statement in the courses does carry a 90-day expiry and an owner in the claim register.