Balance Check

Pricing and growth experiments are the app's economic balance. This skill reads the configuration, applies sanity checks (outliers, illogical funnels, dominant variants, missing fallbacks), and flags issues before they ship to production.

Phase 1: Locate Config

Read in parallel:

• Pricing config files — typical paths: assets/data/pricing.json, src/config/pricing.ts, lib/config/pricing.dart, Resources/pricing.plist, res/raw/pricing.xml.
• Paywall variant config — assets/paywalls/*.json, src/config/paywalls/*.
• Feature flags — local defaults file, plus the cloud provider reference (Firebase Remote Config, LaunchDarkly, ConfigCat, Statsig). The cloud values may live in production/configs/.
• Experiment definitions — production/experiments/*.md or whatever the project uses.
• The PRDs that govern monetization — design/prd/monetization.prd.md, design/prd/paywall.prd.md.

If nothing is found, ask the user to point at the relevant file or folder.

Phase 2: Pricing Sanity

For each pricing tier configuration, check:

• Currency is set per supported region.
• Each price has a fallback for App Store / Play Store SKU.
• Annual prices are at most 12x monthly; if higher, surface as a bug (probably an inverted unit). If lower than 8x monthly, the annual is essentially "always buy annual" — flag dominance.
• Trial duration is reasonable (1-30 days). 0-day trials should be removed unless intentional.
• Discount percentages match parent vs current price arithmetic (no was $9.99 / now $14.99 type errors).
• Each tier maps to a defined SKU on both App Store Connect and Play Console (cross-reference the SKU IDs).
• No tier is reachable only through deprecated paths (paywall variant the app no longer renders).
• Localized prices are not silently in USD — confirm priceLocale handling.

Phase 3: Paywall Variant Audit

If multiple paywall variants exist, build a comparison table:

| Variant | Headline | CTA | Price tiers shown | Trial | Default for cohort |

Check:

• No two variants have identical render and cohort. (Suggests dead experiment.)
• Each variant ID is referenced in the experiment registry.
• Each variant has localized strings present (cross-check with /localize).
• CTA copy is differentiated; if identical CTAs across variants, the experiment cannot measure CTA-driven impact.

Phase 4: Experiment Health

Read experiment definitions. Per experiment:

• Hypothesis is stated.
• Primary metric is named.
• Sample size or duration is specified.
• Stop conditions are defined (early-stop on harm, max duration).
• Variant allocations sum to 100%.
• No two active experiments target the same primary metric without coordinated layering — surface conflict if found.
• No experiment depends on a feature flag that is also being modified by another active experiment.

Surface:

• Dominant-variant risk: when historical telemetry (if accessible at production/analytics/) shows one variant outperforming the others by > 30% on the primary metric, flag the experiment for early promotion.
• Long-tail risk: experiments running > 30 days without action.

Phase 5: Feature Flag Hygiene

For each flag in the local defaults:

• Default value matches what the cloud config will fall back to when offline.
• No flag toggles risky behavior with a default of ON unless that is explicitly intended.
• No flag is referenced in code but missing from the defaults file (would crash on offline first launch).
• No flag exists in defaults but unused in code (dead flag — open a story to remove).
• Each flag is owned (annotation or doc comment with team name).

Render dead-flag list and ask user whether to clean up.

Phase 6: Funnel Sanity

Walk the monetization funnel against the PRD:

1. Trigger (onboarding end, content gate, etc.).
2. Paywall variant rendered.
3. Tier selected.
4. Purchase attempted.
5. Purchase confirmed.
6. Receipt validated server-side.
7. Entitlement granted.

For each step, confirm the analytics event exists (grep for the named events) and is wired. Missing events break attribution.

If the funnel skips server-side receipt validation, that is P0 (revenue risk).

Phase 7: Render Report

# Balance Check — [date]

## Pricing Findings
| Severity | Finding | Where |

## Paywall Variants
| Variant | Active | Issues |

## Experiments
| Name | Status | Findings | Recommend |

## Feature Flags
- Dead flags: [list]
- Mismatched defaults: [list]
- Unowned flags: [list]

## Funnel
- Missing analytics events: [list]
- Server-side receipt validation: [present | MISSING]

## Recommendations
- [P0/P1/P2 with action]

## Verdict: BALANCED / IMBALANCE / BLOCKING

Ask before writing to production/balance/balance-check-[date].md.

Phase 8: Update State

Append to production/session-state/active.md:

## Balance Check — [date]
- P0 issues: [count]
- Dominant-variant flags: [count]
- Dead flags: [count]
- Verdict: [verdict]
- Report: [path]
- Next: [/create-stories for P0/P1, or proceed]

Quality Gates / PASS-FAIL

• BALANCED — pricing is internally consistent, no unowned flags, no funnel events missing, server-side receipt validation present.
• IMBALANCE — non-blocking issues exist (dead flags, dominant variants not yet promoted).
• BLOCKING — pricing arithmetic errors, missing receipt validation, flag references that crash offline launch, or experiments with invalid allocations.

Examples

Example 1 — Pre-release pricing tweak: User reduces annual price below 8x monthly. Skill flags dominance: "Most users will find no reason to pick monthly. Confirm intent." User confirms — promotion strategy. Verdict: IMBALANCE (with note).

Example 2 — Dead experiment cleanup: Detects 3 paywall variants no longer referenced by any active experiment. User approves removal of variants and config simplification. Two follow-up stories filed.

Next Steps

• BLOCKING -> open stories via /create-stories, fix before release.
• IMBALANCE -> schedule cleanup in next sprint via /sprint-plan.
• BALANCED -> include verdict in /launch-checklist.