Launch Readiness Review — GTM, Website, Sales Sprint Tutorial

Audit date: October 5, 2026. Status as of: October 7, 2026, after the launch-week fixes shipped. Audience: the operator, the sales manager, and every member of the sales flock. Scope: both live websites (apertureapi.com, api.apertureapi.com), this GTM tree (pages 00–12), the public docs, the signup and billing code, and the production account store.

Bottom line. ApertureAPI is ready for a launch week. Anyone can try it with no signup, start a free 3-month trial in under a minute, or pay by card through Stripe (live). There is one offer, one price list and one definition of a customer, and every surface says the same thing. The customer count runs from the system of record. Of the October 5 audit's findings, every engineering item is fixed. What's left is three operator calls, listed at the end.

Status at a glance

Signup: three ways in

• No signup: the upload form reconstructs a hologram in the browser with no account, key or email.
• Free 3-month trial: api.apertureapi.com/signup takes an email and password and shows the API key on the spot, with a copy-paste quickstart that already has the key filled in. Developers can also sign up with one call to /users/signup.
• Paid plans: chosen on the same page and paid on Stripe's secure checkout. The account upgrades automatically when payment clears, and the API key stays the same.
• Email capture: "Not ready yet?" takes an email, with an optional name, organization and note, without creating an account.
• Signup ledger: every signup and captured email lands as one row in ~/ApertureAPI_Signups.csv on A2, next to the processed results, with the referring rep's tag when there is one.
• Buttons everywhere: "Start free trial" in both site headers, "Try it free, no signup" in the hero, and a checkout button on every pricing card.

Payments: Stripe is live

• Live keys, live prices and a live webhook are in production on the company's Stripe account.
• Pay-as-you-go is self-serve: $0.03 per reconstruction, metered by Stripe and invoiced monthly, with no minimum.
• Monthly plans: Development $50 (1,000 a month), Professional $500 (20,000 a month), Enterprise API $5,000. The plans include their quota; there's no per-reconstruction charge on top.
• Accounts upgrade only when payment clears, and drop back automatically if a subscription is cancelled or stops paying.
• The Tier 1 thank-you commission (page 09) can now trigger on a first collected payment.

One offer, one price list

The retired "free for life" promise is gone from every surface. The no-account upload form is a try-it path rather than an account, so it stays free without contradicting the trial.

Website claims

• Removed: "we get practice data to continuously improve our algorithms" and every variant of it. The site now says plainly that uploads are secure and not shared with others, and that nothing you send changes the algorithm.
• Removed: "Zero-phase: <0.05 px drift" from all four places. The zero-phase card now reads "not yet benchmarked", in line with the site's own rule for numbers without a committed artifact.
• Added the front-door answer to "why not 200 lines of generated code?": every result ships with an evidence record, reproduces bit for bit, and can be calibrated to the customer's camera against a known target.
• "Continuous improvement" became "Recomputable results", and the "14-day evaluation" line became the 3-month trial.

The sales playbook is built for volume

• Page 09 opens with live status (no stale go-live date) and defines a customer: a signed-up account that has run at least one real reconstruction. scripts/count_customers.py counts it from the account store and the results archive.
• Two lanes. Lane A is self-serve: a rep sends api.apertureapi.com/signup?ref=<handle> and the signup is attributed automatically, with no call and no LOI. Lane B, with the packet, LOI and scoping call, is kept for provisioners and paid validation pilots.
• Reporting has an owner and a place. The sales manager owns it. Each rep keeps a copy of the outreach-log template (page 12), sent every Monday, and the roll-up adds the automatic counts by referral tag.
• The Tier 2 activation bonus is scoped to signed Lane B partners, so its cost scales with partners, not with signup volume.
• Page 12 points volume at Lane A and the public listings. The prospect CSVs are kept for researched, personal outreach.

Data protection and operations

• Account store backup: nightly, off the box to A2, checked by sha256, kept for 30 days. A full restore was tested on October 7.
• Contact files: the prospect CSVs now require the sales-flock sign-in; a logged-out download returns 401. The GTM pages stay public.
• Test isolation: the test suite can no longer touch production accounts, live Stripe keys, the signup ledger or the results archive.

Capacity for a launch week

• Reconstructions run one at a time on a worker thread, so a burst of new users waits in line instead of competing for memory. Signup, checkout, docs and health checks stay responsive during a reconstruction (verified: under 150 ms while a reconstruction was running).
• Oversized jobs get a clear 507 with what to change, never a crash. The default profile crops to 1920×1080, the size measured safe on this host.
• Limits are published: 5 per hour per IP on the no-account form, 2 per minute on a trial account, more on paid plans.

Where traction stands (the baseline we count from)

• Outreach: 88 personal emails to DHM/QPI researchers went out September 10–12. One researcher is engaged and testing on his synthetic data, and a second forwarded the email to a colleague. Reply forwarding to the operator was repaired on October 5.
• Usage: 66 archived reconstructions by October 5, including an outside, no-account user who ran 9 on September 22.
• Accounts: signup opened on October 7. The customer count starts from zero on that date and comes from scripts/count_customers.py.
• Re-checked October 12: 77 archived reconstructions (69 with a JSON record), still zero outside accounts, zero signup-ledger rows and zero customers. The product works end to end (a 512×512 test hologram reconstructed through the public form in 10–15 seconds and archived). The gap is distribution, not engineering: the operator calls below have not been executed yet. New employees start at page 23.

Operator calls for this week

Buyer pages to pair with this page: workflow fit · validation docket · procurement packet. Pipeline stages and KPIs: page 00.