The questions the flyer could not hold.

Three honest layers:

• The job seeker never pays. Not now, not later, no premium tier aimed at them. Individuals who arrive on their own are covered.
• The software is free for organizations too -- open source, inspectable, forkable.
• Organizations carry their own AI costs. Metered exactly -- every AI call is counted and costed, so you see real numbers, not estimates. A full resume generation currently costs about two cents of compute; monthly per-participant totals land in the cents to low dollars depending on coaching and practice volume. Bring your own keys or rent hosted seats. I can cover individuals; I cannot cover institutions, and I will not pretend otherwise.

Troy's time follows a ladder from free (a guiding call) to paid (hosted seats, hands-on setup, trainings). The whole ladder is published on the organizations page.

AI generation has daily fair-use limits per person. That is what makes "free for the person, forever" a sustainable sentence instead of a startup promise. Partner organizations get higher limits for their cohorts. Nobody hits a paywall mid-crisis: the free path always works.

The platform is deliberately built for the real world: a cracked phone, a shared tablet, a public library computer, bad wifi. No app store, no install -- it is a website that works on whatever is available.

A straw man is the weakest version of an argument, built to be knocked down. A steel man is the strongest honest version. The tools take a person's real history -- record included -- and build the strongest truthful telling of it. Nothing invented, nothing hidden that the person chooses to disclose. Resumes that survive scrutiny, because scrutiny is exactly what this population faces.

The disclosure planner helps a person think through the conviction question: when, how, in what words. It is coaching. It is not a lawyer, it does not interpret statutes for your case, and it tells the user exactly that. For legal questions, we point people to legal resources.

The AI is scaffolding: it hands a person language for their own history and a structure to practice in. It deliberately fades -- the goal is a person who owns their story without the tool, not a person dependent on it. Your staff's judgment, relationships, and presence are not replaceable, and this platform does not try. It gives your staff leverage at 11pm on a Thursday when they are off the clock.

A case manager sees: what stage a participant is at, applications, practice counts, next steps -- signals. What a participant typed into an intake or said in a practice session stays theirs. Sharing with an organization is a consent the participant grants and can revoke. This boundary is enforced in the code, not just written in a policy.

There is no advertising model, no data brokerage, no "partnerships" that mean resale. The business model is published openly: free tools, paid organizational services. For a compliance-grade conversation -- retention, deletion, subprocessors -- bring your security person to a call; that conversation is welcome, not dodged. Book it.

The full platform code is public at github.com/Steel-Man-Resumes/smr-crucible. Your technical reviewer can verify how data is handled instead of taking marketing copy on faith. You can also run your own instance on your own infrastructure -- with my paid help or entirely without me. Skeptics are invited to the proof page.

The pattern is one conversation, then your org space and staff accounts are set up (you watch it happen), then your first participants start on their own phones. Two weeks later we review together. The pace is set by your calendar, not by procurement theater. The exact steps are on the organizations page.

The Refinery includes a live job search and curated fair-chance employer data. Honesty about both: the live feed depends on a third-party provider, and when it has a bad day we show the failure instead of faking results. The fair-chance list is verified by hand against primary sources -- we check what an employer actually practices, not what a listicle claims -- and entries go stale and get re-verified on a clock. Postings from verified fair-chance employers get highlighted in search.

Troy spent about a decade on the staff side of the desk -- 900-plus people through real workforce programs -- and he is also the man on the other side of it, with his own record. "I needed it first" is the founding line and the literal truth. He built the tool nobody built for him. Meet him.

Your note lands directly with Troy. You get a reply within one business day -- written by him, about your situation. No drip campaign, no SDR handoff, no "just circling back." If the fit is wrong, you will be told that plainly too.