From eligibility check to Decision Brief: the whole chain, in order

The chain, step by step

1. 1. Check eligibility

   Before anything is asked for payment, you answer a short unauthenticated screener: a written offer, US-based, and at least 24 hours remaining before your deadline (exactly 24:00:00 remaining qualifies). Your answers are recorded server-side as an eligibility record, independent of any account — you don’t have one yet.

2. 2. Pay as a guest

   Checkout is Stripe, in test mode during this build, and it never asks you to create an account first. You pay $599, or $399 if you’re one of the first 20 paid checkouts — the price shown is always the price charged. No profile exists yet at this point.

3. 3. Your case is created

   A Stripe webhook, not your browser, creates exactly one profile and exactly one case tied to your checkout — idempotently, so a retried webhook delivery can never create a second case for the same payment.

4. 4. A magic link opens the portal

   You receive a one-time magic link (WebAuthn works too, once your profile exists) — there is no password anywhere in this product. The link is single-use, expires in 15 minutes, and signs you into your own portal, and only your own portal.

5. 5. Intake and document upload

   Inside the portal you complete intake — the details of your offer and situation — and upload your documents. This is the step that matters most for your deadline: completing it is what starts your clock.

6. 6. The 24-hour clock starts — at intake completion, not at payment

   The delivery deadline is computed and persisted on our server the instant intake is marked complete. It does not start when you pay, and it cannot be moved by a slow, fast or differently-timezoned browser clock on your end. Paying earlier does not shorten your window, and delaying intake does not extend it — the clock simply hasn’t started until intake has.

7. 7. Your documents are read

   Completing intake starts the work. Every document you uploaded is read end to end and broken into individual statements — what the paperwork says about pay, vesting, clawbacks, and the terms worth questioning — each one tied back to the document and page it came from. Nothing is rewritten into a summary you would have to take on trust.

8. 8. Fact, estimate and judgment are separated

   Every statement is filed as one of three things: what your documents state outright, what is estimated from them, and what is a judgment about them. They are kept in separate sections rather than blended into one list, so you can always see which is which. Nothing produces a market range or a salary benchmark, and nothing rules on whether a clause is legally enforceable — terms worth an attorney’s eye are flagged as exactly that.

9. 9. Your Decision Brief is delivered in the portal

   The result is your Decision Brief: a structured record you read in the portal, and an email telling you it is there. It’s unreachable until it’s ready, and reachable afterward only by you.

A worked timeline example

Say you complete checkout Tuesday morning but don’t finish uploading your documents until early afternoon. Here is how the clock actually runs:

Notice the deadline is measured from 2:14 PM — intake completion — not from 9:00 AM when the card was charged. Five hours and change passed between payment and intake in this example, and none of it counted against the 24 hours.

What you upload, where it goes, and how to remove it

The chain runs on your documents, so here is exactly what that means for your data — the same numbers stated on the privacy page and explained further on the security page.

What you upload

Your offer letter and, if you have it, recruiter correspondence — the same two document kinds the portal’s upload screen accepts. Nothing else is required.

Where it’s stored

A private object store, not a public bucket. Every time a file needs to be read — by you in the portal, or to build your Decision Brief — a brand-new presigned URL is issued, good for five minutes or less. That URL is never saved anywhere, so there is nothing long-lived to leak.

How long it’s kept

Documents are deleted 30 days after your case closes by a scheduled purge job. This is the same number stated on the privacy page — see the link below.

Deleting it sooner

The portal’s document screen has a delete-now control. Using it removes the file from storage and cuts off any further read immediately; the case keeps a record that a deletion happened (an audit row), but the file itself is gone on request, not just after 30 days.

Assumptions

This page holds the following fixed. Change any of them and the chain above changes with it.

When an account exists

No account or profile exists before payment succeeds — checkout is guest-only

What starts the 24-hour clock

Intake completion, computed server-side — never checkout, and never a client-side timestamp

Decision Brief format

A structured document read in your portal, with every statement cited to its source document and page

Document retention

30 days after case close, or immediately on request via delete-now

When this answer changes

• You complete intake later than you expected — the clock still hasn’t started, so it starts from whenever intake actually finishes, not from an estimate made at checkout.
• Your case is delivered late against the 24-hour window — the refund path runs from the case as a scheduled sweep once the deadline passes unmet; you don’t have to request it.
• You want your documents gone before the 30-day window — the portal’s delete-now control removes them immediately rather than waiting for the scheduled purge.
• You have fewer than 24 hours left on your offer’s own deadline before you’ve even started — the eligibility screener will tell you whether the Sprint can still complete in time.

How the dossier itself is sourced

Every statement in your Decision Brief is cited to its source, following the same research method used across OfferMettle — see how we research, source and verify what goes into your dossier. Want to see the numbers before you pay? Run your own offer through the job offer comparison tool, free, with nothing sent anywhere. Pricing details, including the founding-cohort rate, are on the pricing page.