adaptive-pricing/SCOPE.md

SCOPE

One-liner

Auto-regulating market value exploring price engine.

Core Idea

adaptive-pricing provides a practical framework for defining, evaluating, adapting, and implementing pricing models across the product lifecycle. See INTENT.md for the full problem space, lifecycle model, and strategic direction.

In Scope

• Generic pricing core under adaptive_pricing_core/, including: canonical pricing schema and validation, boundary evaluation, comparable customer LTV, customer-tuning solver, provider-publication primitives, Stripe mapping, governance models, and typed customer assurance claims backed by tenancy-posture minimums.
• Generic framework documentation and research (INTENT.md, docs/, research/, registry/).
• Project-specific proving grounds under projects/<slug>/, with Coulomb Social as the first full adopter of the generic core.
• Local execution surfaces that keep internal pricing definitions as the source of truth, including provider shadow publication, governed recommendations, tuning contracts, health checks, and audit history.
• State Hub workplans under workplans/ (ADR-001).

Out of Scope

• Owning unrelated adjacent systems as the source of truth, including Bubble, Stripe, and OpenRouter runtimes.
• Live payment-provider mutation as the default repo behavior. Current provider execution stops at mapping, shadow-state publication, drift detection, and rollback planning.
• Treating approximate provider mappings as fully enforced billing behavior when they still require supplemental operational or contract logic.
• Autonomous customer-visible pricing rollouts or irreversible pricing changes without human approval.
• Treating a tier's assurance wording as authorization, placement state, or a substitute for current service/provider posture evidence. The tier records the commercial minimum; operational owners declare and enforce what exists.
• Plan-derived tenant guardrail ceilings until ADAPTIVE-WP-0010 establishes a jointly accepted contract with tenant-engine. No ceiling schema or feed is implemented yet.
• Project-specific deployment material in generic doc paths (use projects/<slug>/).

Current State

• Phase: framework plus executable core. The repo is no longer just docs and research around a single MVP; it now contains reusable pricing-core modules and one concrete deployment.
• Implemented milestones: ADAPTIVE-WP-0003 through ADAPTIVE-WP-0009 are finished. The repo now has canonical pricing models, explainable boundary validation, comparable-customer LTV simulation, customer-tuning, provider shadow publication, governance workflows, and typed tier assurance claims.
• Generic runtime surface: reusable implementation lives under adaptive_pricing_core/. Assurance claims are optional and default empty; when present, the schema validates typed {I,A,E,P,R,V} minima, the boundary engine checks wording and coupled floors, and governance requires one-time approval when a tier definition adds, changes, or removes a claim.
• Deployment surface: Coulomb Social remains the first proving ground under projects/coulomb-pricing/observatory/, including the dashboard/API, data loaders, tuning pilot, Stripe shadow-publication flow, and governed recommendation surfaces.
• Current commercial posture: all current Coulomb pricing models remain silent on isolation, availability, retention, and performance assurances. The claim machinery is a preparatory guardrail; it does not invent a live customer promise.
• Tenancy posture: root tenancy.yaml declares the observatory as a local, unauthenticated, single-user design-time tool (I0/A0/E0, P/R: n/a, V0). Exposing it as a shared service is a new scope decision requiring a fresh posture assessment before deployment.
• Execution boundary: Stripe support is currently a provider abstraction and local shadow-state publisher, not live Stripe API management.
• Next proposed seam: ADAPTIVE-WP-0010 explores plan-derived tenant guardrail ceilings, but its interface and ownership contract with tenant-engine are not yet agreed and no implementation has started.
• Coordination: State Hub integration (ADAPTIVE-WP-0001) remains the repo workflow backbone for orientation, workplan tracking, generated WORK-RECORDS.md, and brief sync.

Getting Oriented

• Start with: INTENT.md
• Product requirements (generic): docs/ProductRequirementsDocument.md
• Canonical pricing schema: docs/PricingModelSchema.md
• Customer tuning: docs/CustomerTuningSolver.md
• Provider publication: docs/StripePublication.md
• Governance workflow: docs/GovernanceWorkflows.md
• Tenancy posture declaration: tenancy.yaml
• Implementation roadmap: docs/ImplementationRoadmap.md
• Agent instructions: AGENTS.md
• Workplans: workplans/
• Generic code: adaptive_pricing_core/
• Coulomb deployment artifacts: projects/coulomb-pricing/
• Offline hub brief: .custodian-brief.md