Income-share / success-fee option — fair terms designed FIRST

Why / Context

PRD §8.6: an optional deferred, pay-after-placement option on the Career tier's Flagship bundle lowers the barrier to the most expensive offering — validated by Crio's ₹19,999/₹39,999 success-fee model. Sequencing mandate from the teardown (§7): "build the fair refund/guarantee design before you build any placement guarantee at all" — Crio's contested terms are their biggest trust liability; ours must be short, clear, and Euron-style unambiguous. Fair-guarantee design is itself an acquisition message (teardown §5.3: "the fair alternative").

Schema already in place — additive-only later if needed

• Payment(provider: MANUAL) records success-fee collections; Order.metadata holds agreement refs
• Career tier entitlements (placementSupport) + FeatureFlags gate availability
• A future PaymentAgreement table (terms, trigger conditions, status) was pre-authorized as a safe ADDITIVE table in the plan's gap review — add only when this ships

Implementation plan

1. Terms design first (product+legal): success-fee trigger (placed within N months at ≥ X CTC via platform-attributable channels), fee bands, hardship exits, cooling-off, plain-language one-pager — reviewed against every complaint pattern documented in the teardown (§2.4/2.5).
2. Decision gate: founder sign-off on terms BEFORE any engineering (this issue stalls here by design).
3. Additive PaymentAgreement table (kind SUCCESS_FEE, userId, orderItemId?, termsVersion, triggerConditions Json, status DRAFT/ACTIVE/TRIGGERED/SETTLED/WAIVED/CANCELLED, dueMinor) + agreement PDF snapshot.
4. Checkout option on eligible bundles: "defer ₹X — pay only on placement" → agreement acceptance flow (explicit, versioned, emailed copy).
5. Placement attestation flow: learner self-report + hiring-partner confirmation path (ties to issue #18); dispute path documented.
6. Collection: on TRIGGERED, invoice + Razorpay payment link; hardship/waiver workflow with audit.
7. Marketing surfaces: guarantee page with the full terms visible (no admission-letter burial — the anti-Crio stance), comparison honesty in battlecards (issue #28).
8. Metrics: uptake, trigger rate, waiver rate, NPS of participants — evaluate before scaling.

Acceptance criteria

• Terms doc approved by counsel + founder, published verbatim on a public page
• Deferred option appears only on configured bundles behind a flag; acceptance is explicit and versioned
• TRIGGERED → payment link → settlement recorded; WAIVED path works with audit trail
• Cancellation/cooling-off honored automatically within its window
• Zero dark patterns: learner can view their agreement + status anytime

Dependencies / sequencing

• Career tier live (MVP M8); issue #18 helps verification; issue #24 legal groundwork
• HARD GATE: fair-terms sign-off precedes all build work

Start with the fair-terms design and obtain counsel and founder sign-off before engineering. Then inspect the existing Payment records, Order.metadata, Career-tier placementSupport entitlements, and FeatureFlags before implementing the deferred-option flow. Done means approved public terms, explicit versioned acceptance, audited settlement and waiver paths, cooling-off handling, and learner-visible agreement status.