4-Tier Push Fatigue Model

A cycle-tracking app sees you every day. If it pushes every day, you stop opening it within a month. The 4-tier push fatigue model is the design rule Soulwise uses to make sure the daily ritual stays a ritual, not a spam habit.

The four tiers

The cap is hard. If the feature backlog wants a tier-3 push and the week's budget is already spent, the feature ships at tier 2 — or it does not ship that week.

Why it exists

Because the alternative is what most cycle and journaling apps do: every feature adds one more notification, and within six months the user is in the 30%-of-MAU bucket who has notifications fully muted. Once they are muted, the daily check-in dies with everything else.

By forcing every team — design, growth, marketing — to spend out of the same weekly budget, the model surfaces the trade-off before notifications are added, not after.

What never gets a push

• A promotional ping. Ever.
• A "you haven't checked in" nudge more than once per week.
• A streak shame ping. Streaks themselves do not exist in Soulwise; see the daily-check-in glossary entry.
• An astrology forecast push beyond the one weekly cosmic-weather note (tier 2).

What does get a push

• The daily ritual surfaces silently when you open the app (tier 1, free).
• One opt-in morning brief at your chosen hour (tier 2).
• One weekly recap (tier 2).
• A letters-from-past-self card when the cadence triggers (tier 3).
• A letters-from-future-self arrival (tier 3).

Where this lives in the codebase

In a single pushBudget.ts module that every feature adding a notification must call to acquire a tier slot. The model is the implementation; the discipline is enforced by the type system.