Soulwise
4-Tier Push Fatigue Model
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What is the 4-tier push fatigue model?
A Soulwise design rule that classifies every notification into one of four bands by attention cost — silent, surface, sound, and break-in — and budgets how many of each you can receive per week. The result: at most three pushes a week, and never two of the same band on the same day.
- Four tiers: silent, surface, sound, break-in
- Hard weekly budget per tier
- No notification is rated higher than it earns
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
| Tier | Name | Surface | Sound | Weekly cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Silent | In-app card | None | unlimited |
| 2 | Surface | Lock-screen badge | None | 5 |
| 3 | Sound | Banner | Default ping | 2 |
| 4 | Break-in | Full banner | Custom sound | 1 |
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.
Go deeper
See 4-Tier Push Fatigue Model read in your full birth chart
A free placement is the headline. A full reading interprets your whole chart.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because every team starts with that intention and then drifts. A model makes the budget visible to engineering, so adding a feature that wants attention forces a trade-off — not a quiet creep.
Yes. The default is the lowest two tiers only; full silence is one tap in settings.
Tier 1 (silent) by default — a single in-app surface when you open the app. The opt-in nudge is tier 2 at most.