Competitor Recon — Soulmate Sketch Market

Brand 01 · captured 2026-08-20TryAstro (“Astro”)

The company

No legal entity is named anywhere on the customer-facing surfaces — not in Terms, Privacy, Refund Policy, Contact or the footer. The operator trades as the bare word “Astro” and gives two different addresses on two different pages, both rented mail drops:

• 2332 Galiano Street, 2nd Floor, Coral Gables FL 33134 (Terms, Privacy, funnel footer) is the Colonnade Building, sold as a Regus / Davinci virtual office. 25 unrelated entities registered at that address, none named Astro or any variant.
• 30 N Gould Street, Sheridan WY 82801 (Contact page) is the most notorious registered-agent farm in the United States — 200,000+ businesses at one building.

WHOIS is privacy-redacted. Phone 754-208-1594 is a Comcast VoIP business line in Broward County FL, with no reverse-lookup name. The entity was recovered from the Google Ads Transparency verified-advertiser record and then confirmed against the Delaware Division of Corporations registry (file #10200404). Florida Sunbiz has no entity named TryAstro or AA Ecom Industries; Wyoming SoS and OpenCorporates were CAPTCHA-blocked.

Portfolio shell, not an astrology company. The same LLC's boilerplate appears on “Kiss of Honey” (kissofhoney.shop / .co, jewelry dropshipping), with contact piglootmtc@gmail.com and a Los Angeles phone — different front-facing contacts, one Delaware wrapper. Stack fingerprint: Next.js on Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, AWS SES. A one- or two-engineer operation.

Traffic engines

Recon lesson worth keeping. Brand-name Ad Library searches cannot find them. “Astro”, “TryAstro”, “Astro Soulmate” and “Soulmate Sketch” returned 44 pages, none theirs; even “Stars Aligned” returns nine pages that exclude their page ID. The checkout domain is the only reliable handle. Their page name, product brand, domain, advertorial domain and checkout entity are five different strings.

The funnel — g_v16_wsg, live-captured

Mobile capture at 390×844, persona woman 30–39, single. Run 2 passed the face-scan gate with an authorized upload of our own AI-generated persona image and reached the card-entry screen. Stopped there. No payment made.

Shape: landing age gate → social-proof interstitial → 44 questions across 7 named sections → mandatory face scan / photo upload → belief-priming micro-quiz over the loader → email → pay-what-you-want trial → locked-portrait reveal → $1 checkout → decline → scripted spin wheel → “$1 trial win” page carrying the $49.99/mo attach.

Design: black starfield, white serif headlines, rounded answer cards, thin top progress bar, section label in letterspaced caps above each question. Interstitial “reward” screens every 4–6 questions echo the user's last answers back as a mini-reading — personalization theater plus sunk cost.

Downstream of payment Not live-verified

Extracted from hidden pre-rendered slides in the g_v16_wsg bundle. No purchase was made, so none of this was observed in a real post-purchase session.

• Reader persona “Alyssa” (“Soul Reader · Cosmic Interpreter”, 4.9★ / 14,207 readings) with a 48h countdown and staged drip unlocks: personality 24h, meeting location 48h, career 72h, net worth 96h. She is their Stella — a single named human fronting an automated pipeline, promised “within 48 hours by email”.
• $12 one-time Priority Upgrade (12h vs 48h delivery).
• OTO ladder ×2 (full price, then half-off recovery), each with a 3:00 countdown and self-deprecating decline copy (“No thanks, I'll keep repeating the pattern”).
• Decline recovery: inline card retry, “Attempt 1 of 3”, no navigation away — the same shape as our Upsell Checkout v2 failure ladder.

Every OTO carries a 30-day money-back guarantee against the front end's 7-day. Note the arbitrage: the same 6 reports sell for $41.97 in the funnel gauntlet but $19.97 in the portal — the OTO's scarcity claim is contradicted by their own pricing page. They also sell a $60 “real psychic” 3-minute video reading and run a referral loop (“Share Astro with 3 friends and we'll unlock unlimited chats”).

The flow matrix and the two-footer compliance split

/flows/g issues a 307 to /flows/g_v16_wsg — the live champion. Slugs are individually enumerable (real routes 200, fake ones return a 46,362-byte Next.js 404). 25 live flow slugs confirmed by HTTP status sweep: g_v1–g_v16 (g_v7 retired, a genuine gap), g_v16_wsg, r–r_v6, control, normal, main. All front the same offer.

Google Ads requires a visible refund policy for trial/subscription advertisers; the CPRA “Your Privacy Choices” link is the shape Meta and native networks expect. Two parallel legal footers for two ad platforms out of one codebase. The _wsg suffix is a content suffix, not a traffic one — it is 56KB larger than g_v16, and that entire delta is the post-purchase upsell ladder.

Every quiz step posts its variant ID server-side to /api/track-flow-step, so they measure step-level drop-off per variant. 16 g_ iterations and 6 r_ iterations in four months is a serious testing cadence.

Creative strategy — volume is everything, copy is frozen

Launch cadence

Start dates cluster: a steady drip of 1–9 ads/day from 2026-05-07 to 2026-07-17, then a big refresh on 2026-08-12 (13 ads), 08-13 (4) and 08-14 (22). 39 ads in three days, the week before this pull. They are scaling right now, not coasting.

Landing URLs — the negative result that matters

Three landing URLs, all the same flow. The g_v16_wsg variant is assigned server-side after the click, so their split-test matrix is invisible from the Ad Library. Getting it requires hitting the funnel repeatedly — the method this survey used. Note also the sloppiness: 8 ads still point at http://, eating an extra redirect hop. CTAs split between “Learn more” (107) and “See details” (13). No Shop Now, no lead forms.

Ad copy — one sentence on 117 of 120 ads

“Wondering who's meant for you? Our artists draw their face — see the person destined to be in your life 💕✨” — 111 of 120 (a further 6 are the same line with the emoji stripped)

Headline: “Get a hand-drawn Drawing of the face you're destined to meet 💕✨See the face of the person meant to be in your life” — 117 of 120

The main headline is two sentences jammed together with no separator and a capital-D “Drawing” mid-phrase. Machine-assembled, never proofread, running on ~97% of a 187-ad account. They do not test copy. They test video and let one sentence ride. 101 of 120 ads carry no link description at all.

The angle in one line: human artists (“our artists draw their face”) plus destiny (“the person destined to be in your life”). Never AI. In short-form copy, never astrology mechanics either — astrology only appears once the viewer is inside a VSL or the advertorial.

The VSL skeleton — one script, gender-flipped

Two long VSLs run the same eight beats, beat for beat, pointed at two audiences. The female version (96s, “Teresa”) and the male version (108s) differ only in dressing.

Do not copy Beat 6 puts fabricated first-person testimonials in the mouths of four real, living, named public figures. That is not a grey area, it is straightforward false endorsement of identifiable people. Testimonial videos are served from their Supabase bucket as deep11.mp4, deep12.mp4, deep13.mp4, deep15.mp4 — the deep prefix and non-contiguous numbering are consistent with deepfake output Inference from filenames.

The account's biggest-reach creative is the opposite: a 50s vox-pop street interview with multiple speakers and no pitch at all, carrying 1.17M EU reach. Pure top-of-funnel curiosity bait.

Targeting and reach

• Worldwide, not US-only. Reach spans 27 EU/EEA countries plus GB and the French overseas territories. They buy the cheapest impressions on earth and funnel everyone into one English-language flow. Our standing rule is USA-only; theirs is the opposite.
• “All genders” is a setting, not an outcome. Both VSL ads are set to All, Worldwide, 18–65. The Teresa creative's UK breakdown comes back ~96% female (35–44 band: 2,792 female vs 107 male). They never gender-target; the creative selects the audience and Meta's optimiser segments.
• They genuinely advertise to men. Beat-for-beat gender-flipped VSLs are a deliberate two-audience build. Direct input to the open Lane A / Lane B gender-expansion scoping.
• Age skews by creative, not by setting. Vox-pop shorts land mostly on 18–24; the Teresa VSL lands on 35–54, the band that actually buys.
• Reach figures: vox-pop ad EU 1,167,270 / UK 79,344. Teresa VSL EU 18,201 / UK 7,905. Spend and impressions are null on every ad — Meta only exposes those for issue/political ads.

The advertorial — their best asset, barely running

One ad of 120, on the bridge domain daily-cosmic.com. A 7,044-character first-person confession advertorial in a woman's voice (52, three years of failed dating apps, $4,000 across coach / matchmaker / course / retreat), headlined “I spent $4,000 trying to meet someone in 3 years”. Structure: failure stack → “maybe I'm the problem” → 2am Googling → rejection of generic advice → mechanism reveal → product → proposal → a fake “EDIT:” and a fake Q&A. Paragraph separators are U+2800 braille-blank characters, a known trick to stop Facebook collapsing whitespace.

“The reason you keep missing him is that you've never seen his face. The brain doesn't recognize people from descriptions. It recognizes them from faces… once you've seen his face — even drawn, even once — your mind locks it in.”

That is the sharpest positioning statement in the entire account, and it is running on a single ad. It is also the only ad anywhere that discloses the subscription: “like most of these apps it continues as a subscription after the trial unless you cancel… The $1 is what gets you in to see the sketch.”

The Google lane

Confirmed live on 2026-08-20 via the Ads Transparency Center: AA ECOM INDUSTRIES LLC, identity verified, US, 17 ads, last shown the day of the check, all landing on tryastro.org/g. Observed copy: “Take The 60-Second Soulmate Reading Quiz…”, “See What Your Soulmate Looks Like Now…”, “Detailed Astrological Soulmate Drawing…”, all sharing the tagline “Get Deep Cosmic Insights Into Your Love Life and a Detailed Sketch of Your Soulmate”.

On-site corroboration: Google Ads conversion tag AW-16987805146 with four conversion labels (purchase / checkout / pageview / lead), wired to mirror Meta pixel events into Google conversions and special-casing content_name === 'Astro Upsell' so upsell revenue feeds the bidder. That is a full-funnel setup, not a leftover tag. No Bing / Microsoft UET tag was found.

Zero paid keywords in DataForSEO Labs for tryastro.org, with a geico.com control proving the field populates. The evidence leans PMax / Demand Gen, YouTube-weighted, not classic keyword search Reasoned read, campaign type never disclosed. Ad spend: not determined — no source in this pass returns it, and any dollar figure would be fabricated.

Organic — there is no SEO arm

20 ranked keywords, ~47 visits/month (estimate), 9 referring domains (all spam: seopxl-*.shop, betwinnermirror.com, backlink spam score 34), 4 indexed pages. All 20 keywords are flagged is_new — the whole footprint appeared inside the current comparison window.

Two findings inside that noise are genuinely useful:

• Their /help page is doing unintentional post-purchase SEO. Its ranked queries are billing-complaint queries: “how to check astro bill”, “quiz atrix guide charge”, “no tel astro customer service”, “astro returns”. Customers who got charged search the descriptor on their statement and land on the help page. That is the shape of a subscription funnel generating billing confusion — the same failure mode our $7.77/mo chargeback work chased.
• They rank for competitors' brand names — “easystars soulmate” (1,300/mo), “astro club soulmate”, “respontika soulmate”, “quizatrix guide”. Positions 25–49, so almost no traffic, but it maps the vertical.

Vertical SERP check on “soulmate sketch” (US, desktop, depth 30): zero paid ad slots on the entire SERP, tryastro absent from the top 30, and an AI Overview that flatly calls these offers “marketing funnels or automated generators rather than genuine psychic readings”. Organic search is hostile ground for this category, which is consistent with everyone in it staying on paid social.

Their exposure — what not to copy

• Their own /help has dedicated FAQ entries for “I only paid $1, why was I charged more?”, “I cancelled but I'm still being charged” and “I didn't sign up for this”, plus explicit chargeback deflection: “Contact us directly, it's faster than going through your bank.” You do not build that FAQ unless those are your top tickets.
• Policy pages contradict each other. /refund (April 2026) still describes a dead $15 one-time model with “no trial period and no recurring or auto-renewing charges”; /terms (June 2026) describes the $1 trial into $49.99/month. Guarantee copy is 7-day on the reveal page and 30-day on checkout, one screen apart.
• The Privacy Policy is factually false. It states “We do not use third-party advertising cookies” while every variant ships Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, Google Ads conversion tag and Microsoft Clarity. That is a live CPRA exposure.
• Unverifiable social proof: “60M+ readings”, “21M+ people”, “133K+ reviews”, “#1 Lifestyle”, Cosmopolitan and Bustle press badges with no article or citation, live-activity counters that are client-side theatre. A four-month-old domain claiming 60M readings is not plausible.
• “Real psychic” / “real artist” claims against 48-hour delivery at $1–$9.95 pricing and a two-person infrastructure footprint Likely automated, flagged as exposure not proven fraud.
• The subscription is disclosed in exactly one of 120 parsed ads.

This is the profile platforms nuke. Our TikTok account was permanently suspended for far less. Trustpilot sits at 3.3★/~106 after four months — real volume, genuinely split base: the product lands for some buyers and the billing burns others. No FTC, state AG, BBB or class action was found, but the domain is four months old, so absence is expected rather than exonerating.

Open threads

• 67 of 187 Meta ads unparsed (36%). TikTok ad enumeration not done despite a live pixel.
• Post-purchase OTO screens remain DOM-sourced only — no purchase made.
• Historical / inactive ad sweep (status=ALL) not run; would show older page names, dead domains and retired copy.
• auralyapp.com connection unresolved. Wyoming SoS and OpenCorporates remain CAPTCHA-blocked.
• The /flows/es Spanish variant implies a Spanish-language traffic lane not investigated.

Full g_v16_wsg walkthrough in step order, mobile 390×844.

step 01 age gatestep 02 social proof interstitialstep 03step 04step 05step 06step 07step 08step 09step 10step 11step 12step 13step 14step 15step 16step 17step 18step 19step 20step 21step 22step 23step 24step 25step 26step 27step 28step 29step 30step 31step 32step 33step 34step 35step 36step 37step 38step 39step 40step 41step 42step 43step 43b multiselectstep 44step 45step 46step 47step 48step 49 face scan gatestep 50 analyzing facial energystep 51 psychic artistry questionstep 52 love at first sight questionstep 53 spiritual person questionstep 54 ready to see face questionstep 56 email capturestep 57 cosmic patterns transition astep 58 cosmic patterns transition bstep 59 choose trial pricestep 61 reveal page b scrolledstep 62 checkout payment astep 62 checkout payment bstep 63 current statestep 64 newsalespage bstep 64 newsalespage cstep 65 after back forward

Brand 02 · captured 2026-08-21Respontika / Staroly

The network

One legal document names three different addresses in three jurisdictions. That is not sloppiness — it is three real entities plus boilerplate bleed from a fourth. Resolved map:

The malformed “3 Orbis Bridges Court Road Wharf London GB SW11 3GW” block sitting under the “Respontika Inc.” heading in the .com Terms is Kovexa's address, left in from shared boilerplate. It also explains the stray “laws of the United Kingdom” IP clause sitting next to Delaware governing law and a claim that the services are hosted in Germany and/or the Netherlands.

Cyprus director/secretary Andreas Charalampous holds both roles and appears across numerous unrelated Cyprus companies at an address shared with a corporate-services firm. That is the standard nominee pattern; his name does not identify the beneficial owner. Bonio is different — sole active director of a UK operating company with filed accounts, which is a beneficial-owner-level signal Likely the operator; confirmed only as sole active director.

Why the split merchant of record matters: US buyers bill through the unverified Texas entity, EU buyers through the Cyprus entity, with a compliance-forward corporate page at spiritika.eu built to reassure acquirers. An operator carrying this dispute volume needs redundant processing Reasoned inference, not a stated fact.

Operator-origin fingerprints: SPF includes spf2.esputnik.com and _spf.ukraine.com.ua; MX includes mx.ukraine.com.ua. Two Meta pages self-categorise as “Екстрасенс” (Ukrainian for psychic). A redirect experiment param reads lada-team_resp-to-strl-5d — a “lada-team” routing respontika traffic to Staroly. Read: CIS team, UK/US/Cyprus billing wrappers.

Portfolio

Six AI “expert” personas (Amanda, Courtney, Olivia, Kristin, Chris, Shawn) carry human names, human photos, tenure claims (6–12 years) and approval ratings (97–98%) — and are explicitly disclosed as AI in the same viewport:

“At Respontika, our ‘experts,’ ‘coaches,’ and ‘psychologists’ are AI-powered assistants created by our team… These assistants are not real people and do not hold medical or psychological licenses.”

The disclosure is real and prominent, and they still take the hit — because the persona cards oversell exactly what the fine print then disclaims. Staroly drops the AI disclaimer while still claiming “expert psychologists” in its FAQ.

FOUR captured arms off one quiz engine

Not two funnels — four, sharing one quiz engine, one CRM and one pair of upsell routes. Three sell the sketch on a trial-to-subscription ladder; the fourth sells a different product on straight term billing with no trial at all. Which sketch arm a buyer gets depends on the entry path, and the price ladder and the statement descriptor change with it. All four were walked end to end. No payment was made on any arm.

A. Staroly — the Meta ad path

respontika.com/funnels/sketch-3p 302s mid-click to staroly.com/onboarding/soulmate-weekly-exp-coreb-sk-anima-anim-scratch (exp_name=lada-team_resp-to-strl-5d_respontikacom). Captured shape: landing → 16-question quiz (soulmate age and ethnicity spec capture, agree-scales, spirit animal) → DOB → a “98% done” fake-progress interstitial at Q8 → answer-echo profile → email gate with a blurred sketch → paywall.

• Offer: $5.00 for a 7-day trial (coupon STAROLY66, struck from $14.50), then $14.50/week until canceled (~$63/mo). Descriptor STAROLY.COM.
• 30-day money-back guarantee stated on the paywall.
• No upsell and no downsell on this path.

B. Respontika native weekly — no redirect

respontika.com/funnels/soulmate/weekly serves respontika's own quiz: blue brand palette, steps /1…/23, no hop to Staroly. Same 16-question skeleton, but an element question (Water / Fire / Earth / Air) replaces the spirit animal, and a social-proof review screen opens the flow. After email capture comes a promo-code screen (“one time exclusive promo code for 90% discount”, code RESPONTIKA90) and then the paywall.

• Offer: CA$1.00 for a 7-day trial, then CA$9.99/week until canceled (~CA$43/mo). Descriptor RESPONTIKA.COM. Footer address: 701 Tillery Street Unit 12-1539, Austin TX 78702.
• Prices rendered in CAD for a Canadian session — pricing is geo-aware, so no cross-brand number should be compared without normalising currency first.
• This path DOES have an upsell stack. /upsells/soulmate is a $10.99 one-time “Expanded” report tier (6 deliverables, explicitly “not a recurring subscription”). Declining it fires /upsells/timer — a 29:59 countdown reselling the same $10.99 as “was $21.98, SAVE 50%” to get the sketch “in seconds” instead of 30 minutes. The wait is manufactured, and it is the same lever TryAstro pulls with its 24–96h drip.

C. Respontika native monthly — the CA$39.99 arm Captured live 2026-08-22

respontika.com/funnels/soulmate/monthly-50c/0 runs the identical 16-question quiz template as arm B — same element question, same personalization summary, same loader, same email gate, no photo gate anywhere. The quiz is not the variable being tested. The paywall is.

• Offer: CA$1.00 for a 7-day trial, then CA$39.99/month until cancelled. Coupon RESPONTIKA97 (“97% off”) is auto-applied. Descriptor respontika.com. 30-day money-back guarantee. Apple Pay + Google Pay + card.
• Retention claim at the moment of card entry: the modal carries “91% of users stay with us after the initial 7-day period.” Presented as reassurance, doing the exact opposite job of a cancel reminder.
• A fine-print contradiction. The consent text promises “a promotional discount” on the first monthly charge and then names CA$39.99 — the same as the full price. Almost certainly a template leftover from an arm where the two differed, but it means the discount on this arm is nominal.

Consent text, verbatim: “By paying for your plan you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. For the 7-day trial period, you authorize us to charge an amount of CA$1.00, which will be processed consecutively as two separate transactions in the amounts of $0.40 and $0.60. Upon expiration of the 7-day trial period, unless canceled beforehand, your selected subscription automatically starts as a monthly plan. A promotional discount will apply, and you will be charged CA$39.99 for the first monthly plan. Starting from the second monthly plan, the full price of CA$39.99 per month will apply, unless you cancel the subscription anytime before the renewal date through the ‘Billing Info’ section in your account or by emailing us at support@respontika.com. The payments will be listed on your bill as respontika.com. You can find more details in our Cancelation and Refunds Policy.”

Why this arm changes the model. It explains the US complaint reports of $29.99 and $39.99 charges, which had no matching captured ladder before this walk. And it is a higher-variance ladder, not a cheaper one: a single successful rebill collects 4× what a weekly rebill collects, so the per-start ceiling sits materially above the weekly arms even though the mid-case value comes out the same.

D. The 28-Day Challenge — a different product entirely Captured live 2026-08-22

respontika.com/funnels/main does not sell a sketch. It sells an astrology/ritual self-improvement course delivered as four weekly modules (week 1 = “Foundations and Mindfulness”). This is their retention and LTV backend, and it is the most strategically interesting thing in this entire teardown.

Everything about the shape is lighter than the sketch arms: a 6-question quiz instead of 16, no interstitials, no fake-progress screen, no photo gate, no promo-code screen. It is a qualification form, not a sunk-cost machine — which is exactly what you build when you are selling to someone already on your list rather than to cold traffic.

Auto-renews per term. Descriptor respontika.com. 30-day guarantee. No split-transaction language — that tactic is specific to the CA$1.00 trial arms.

Consent text, verbatim (3-month default; the 1- and 6-month variants swap only the amount and the interval): “By paying for your plan you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and that you will automatically be charged CA$19.99 every 3-months, unless you cancel your subscription before the renewal date through the ‘Billing Info’ section in your account or by emailing us at support@respontika.com. The payment will be listed on your bill as respontika.com. You can find more details in our Cancelation and Refunds Policy.”

• Copy contamination. The personalization card inside this non-sketch funnel says “Done to your Soulmate sketch” and “Palm reading goal”. Shared template, sloppy re-skin, never proofread — the same machine-assembled-and-shipped signature as their Meta ad headline.
• No cross-sell exists. Nothing on the sketch arms links to this product. If it is sold into the sketch list, that happens over email/CRM, not on-funnel.
• The decline path dead-ends. The card modal has an X; closing it returns to the pricing screen with no exit-intent offer and no downsell. For an operator this aggressive, that is a real gap in their own funnel.

Common to the three sketch arms

• No face scan, no photo upload, no birth time or place — DOB only. That is the whole biometric surface, and it is empty.
• Mandatory consent checkbox spelling out trial price, rebill amount, descriptor and card-storage consent, unchecked by default and gating the pay button — legally tighter than TryAstro, though the recurring price is visually buried under the huge trial figure.
• Sketch promised “within 2 minutes” — instant AI, no delivery theater.
• The /upsells/soulmate and /upsells/timer routes at $10.99 are shared infrastructure — confirmed live on arm B, confirmed to still exist from arm C's DOM.

Billing cadence is the sharpest structural difference between them and everyone else — and they run both cadences at once. At CA$9.99/week they collect ~CA$43/mo and can bill four or five times before a typical cancel decision, against a single monthly decision point at TryAstro. At CA$39.99/month they collect 4× per charge with fewer decision points. Running both against the same 16-question quiz is a deliberate hedge — high-frequency/low-ticket against low-frequency/high-ticket — and the VWO install says they are measuring exactly that. It is also why their cancellation-search volume nearly equals their brand-search volume.

The $10.99 upsell bundles six deliverables, the first of which is literally called “🎨 Soulmate Sketch” and is described as “a description of their appearance and energy based on your astrological chart” — text, not necessarily a drawn portrait. That gap is their weakness and our differentiator.

Beyond the subscription, the Terms monetise further: chats are capped at 2 minutes with paid overage, chatting with a different expert costs extra, premium reports carry additional non-refundable fees, and users are invited to leave tips for their AI expert.

Refund policy — the chargeback machine

Last updated January 24, 2023, over three years stale against the April 2026 privacy policy. Seven-day refund window, discretionary denial reserved, and hard carve-outs with no refund available for: expert chat fees, tips older than 3 days, premium reports, and — the sharp one — “Subscriptions that have been billed more than once.” Combined with a 1–7 day trial and weekly billing, the window to notice and act is very small. That carve-out converts a refund request into a dispute, and disputes are what get processors pulled.

Ad engines

The four dark Meta pages are worth keeping on a watchlist, because a dark page going live is the tell that the live page got restricted: Anna Ley (272803212582058), Nova Sinclair (585922614600012), Soulmate Sketch (595053747035199), Sofia Clairé (889203500932062). Three fake-psychic personal names plus two generic product names — the same play we run with Stella/Lara, executed as disposable page identities rather than a persistent brand.

One body copy, one CTA, for a full year

Body: ✨ Ever Wondered Who's Destined for You?
Get a Custom Portrait Based on Your Energy 💖
Title: Take quiz and check it out!
Link description: 💘Unlock Your Future Love!
CTA: Learn more (video) / See details (image)

An exact-phrase search for “Ever Wondered Who's Destined for You” returned only respontika pages — 30 of 30 hits across the five page IDs, zero other advertisers. That string is a reliable fingerprint for future monitoring.

Their landing-path matrix is two paths, ever: /funnel-sketch (52 ads, 2025-08 → 2026-08, legacy) and /funnels/sketch-3p (36 ads, 2026-02 → now). No UTMs, no per-creative params, no ad-ID macros. They test almost nothing. Their edge is duplication volume, not iteration — which is exactly where our creative-testing cadence is an advantage.

The key Meta finding: no voiceover, ever

A transcript pull on their most-duplicated video (47s) returned song lyrics only, and Gemini video analysis confirms “no voiceover or specific sound effects” across all 30 scenes. The entire sales argument is burned-in on-screen text over a licensed pop track. No script, no talking head, no narration, no character voice. One exception exists: a 57s video opens with a 5-second deep, calm, echoey male VO over a stormy sky — a cold-open hook, not narration.

That is dramatically cheaper to produce than our VO + Omni pipeline and sidesteps voice-consistency work entirely. The format itself is the hypothesis, not the script.

Top hooks — verbatim

1. The overhead-sketch reveal (video, primary format, 47s). Two floating panels above a real person's head labelled me | my soulmate, both blurred, then resolving into pencil portraits. Mid-roll banner: “I'LL DRAW THE PERSON YOU MAY MARRY” / “TAKE TEST”. End-roll: “See who your soulmate really is!”. ~30 micro-scenes of 1–3 seconds, all selfie/static-medium angles, deliberately native UGC-looking, diverse cast. Several scenes deliver the payoff: the sketch resolves, then a real person matching that sketch walks into frame. Sketch → real-person match is the whole mechanic, repeated ~10 times in 47 seconds.
2. The Twin Flame / Karmic / Soulmate taxonomy (video, 57s, strongest concept). Cold open on a stormy sky, male VO: “Your soulmate has a face. Want to see it?” Then a yellow banner held for the remaining 52 seconds: “THIS WILL GIVE YOU GOOSEBUMPS. WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOUR SOULMATE LOOKS LIKE.” Three slots above each subject's head — blue flame, green flame, red fiery heart — each filling with a different sketched face: Twin Flame — Wrong person ❌ / Karmic — Wrong timing ⏰ / Soulmate — Right everything ✅
3. The tattoo pattern-interrupt (static). A woman's bare shoulder against a night-city window, tattooed with a photorealistic man's face and, in tattoo lettering, “THEY WILL DRAW THE PERSON YOU'LL MARRY”. Reads as a real photo, not an ad.
4. The split-screen proof (static). Left: pencil sketch of a bald bearded man. Right: photo of a real man in USMC digital camo who matches it. Red chips: “Got this sketch” | “Met him 3 months later!” The cleanest proof asset in the set — the sketch/reality claim made literal in one frame. We do not currently have an equivalent.
5. The antique locket (static). White-gloved hands holding an oval gold-framed miniature portrait on an old leather case. Serif headline “Check Your Soulmate Face”. Heritage/artifact framing — the sketch as a treasured antique rather than a digital output.
6. The torn-paper line art (static). Black-and-white editorial line drawing of a couple on torn paper texture: “SEE YOUR SOULMATE'S FACE”.

“TAKE TEST” beats every purchase-intent CTA they could have used. Every creative, every format, one year. Quiz-first framing, zero commerce language on the ad surface.

Targeting

Worldwide with Guadeloupe, Netherlands and Cyprus explicitly excluded (likely payment, refund or regulatory friction — worth noting if we ever go broad-geo). Gender All, age 18–65. EU reach 55,028 / GB 18,219 on the top ad. Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger, Threads, and newer August 2026 ads add WhatsApp.

Same pattern across all 30 EU countries reported. They set gender to All and let the algorithm find women — but their creatives deliberately include male reaction shots, which is what keeps the “All” setting viable. No interest stacking, no lookalikes indicated: pure creative-led broad targeting.

The Google lane — 98.5% display, and the search lane is live

Cadence by month of first appearance: 33 (Sep 2025) → 93 → 107 (Nov, peak) → 85 → 34 → 24 → 30 → 6 → 9 → 0 (Jun 2026) → 0 (Jul) → 31 (Aug). Currently live: 13 creatives in the last 3 days, 31 in the last 30, and all 31 are the August cohort. Nothing from the 2025 library still serves. They are in an active re-test right now, not steady-state scaling.

Their live August creatives sell our exact product. Headlines: “End The Guessing In Love”, “See Your Love Life Clearly”, “Love Clarity Starts Here”, “See The Face of The One”, “Soulmate Sketch Try Now”. Descriptions repeat verbatim across creatives (“Find Out What Your Soulmate Looks Like According to Destiny” appears on at least three) — they test images and headlines against a fixed description, which is disciplined variable isolation, not a spray.

• The hook is the face, not the reading. Every headline promises seeing. The mechanic is visual reveal, never “reading” or “insight”.
• Curiosity framing, zero crisis framing. Independent confirmation that the category converts on curiosity, which is exactly our own Soulmate Sketch read.
• The obscured face is the whole visual system — a blurred silhouette in a locket, a “?” in a portrait frame, a covered face on parchment. The open loop is drawn, not written.
• They recycle vertical UGC video stills into GDN display frames, and they personalize the mock result inside the ad itself (“Loren, your wedding with James will be on March 21, 2026”) — a fabricated proof asset shown pre-click.
• “According to Destiny” is doing compliance work, framing the output as fate rather than a prediction claim.

In March 2026 they ran search ads to dedicated landing pages /soulmate/drawing and /soulmate/sketch; both now return genuine 404s. The two live August search ads point at the root domain instead. They abandoned the dedicated-LP structure and collapsed everything into the single quiz funnel.

Method note worth keeping: every keyword estimator reports zero paid keywords for respontika.com (with a geico.com control proving the field populates). Yet ATC proves search ads are serving today. ATC is the ground truth for whether a competitor buys search; DataForSEO is the ground truth for which keywords at scale. A keyword tool alone would have reported “no Google ads at all” — wrong by 452 creatives.

Organic — their SERP is a churn readout

~44 ranked keywords, ~1,200 visits/month equivalent (estimate), 43 referring domains. Almost all position-1 rankings are their own brand terms. The signal that matters:

Add the cancellation cluster and it comes to ~1,250 searches/month of pure exit intent against 1,300/mo for their main brand term. Roughly one cancellation search for every brand search, and it is publicly visible. Google has also clustered them with the recurring-billing complaint cohort — their keyword neighbourhood is populated by other “cancel subscription” queries for unrelated brands.

Reputation and exposure

The distribution is a barbell: 45.6% one-star against 43.4% five-star with only 11% in between. A genuine mixed-quality service produces a middle. This near-empty 2/3/4-star band is the signature of solicited five-star reviews sitting on top of an organic one-star complaint stream. See it live on Trustpilot.

BBB has posted a Pattern of Complaints alert on the Austin TX profile (file opened 2025-07-07, not accredited, not rated, did not respond to BBB's advertising-review inquiry). That is not a customer opinion — it is BBB's own finding that complaint volume and type form a pattern the business has not resolved. Two independent adjudicators have now flagged this operator.

The complaint mechanism, identical across ten countries

1. Ad on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook promises a soulmate sketch for $1 / £1 / €1.
2. Payment often taken via Apple Pay — one tap, minimal disclosure surface.
3. Buyer is enrolled in a 7-day trial that converts to WEEKLY billing, not monthly as most assumed.
4. Rebill amounts reported: $10, $14.50, $14.99, $29.99, $39.99, £5.99, £12.99, €9.90.
5. Login frequently fails — account not recognised, password-reset email never arrives — so the self-serve cancellation path named in the Terms is unreachable.
6. Support replies are scripted and refuse refunds, citing the policy.
7. Buyers escalate to card replacement, bank disputes, chargebacks, the CFPB, and Google Play removal requests.

Note item 5 against Terms that place the burden entirely on the user (“It is your responsibility to track trial end dates”). If login is broken, that duty is impossible to discharge. Broken cancellation is the accelerant, not the rebill itself.

Note also a separate failure: several reviewers never received the sketch at all. The deliverable failure and the billing failure are two different problems, and fixing the billing would not fix the product.

“I purchased the ‘soulmate sketch’ for $1, just for fun, and never agreed to any subscription. Yet after checking my credit card bill a few weeks later, I discovered I had been charged $10 every week for a subscription I never signed up for or authorized. When I contacted customer support and asked for a refund, they refused.” — AT, 2025-10-04

“The website forces account creation and then blocks cancellation: my login details were not recognised, password reset does not work, and cancellation requests go unanswered.” — GB, 2025-09-25

Observed entry prices in the wild span $0.50 / $0.99 / $1.00 / £1 / €1 with rebills from $10 to $39.99 at weekly, monthly and unspecified intervals Buyer reports, not transacted by us. That spread is itself evidence of aggressive multivariate price testing, consistent with the VWO install and the price-variant URL paths.

The 2026-08-22 monthly capture closes a gap in this evidence. The stated-weekly reports ($10, $14.50) map cleanly onto arms A and B. The $29.99 and $39.99 reports never had a matching captured ladder — and arm C is one: a US-served equivalent of CA$39.99/month lands almost exactly there. Those complaints are most likely the monthly arm reaching US buyers, not mystery pricing.

Versus TryAstro — fully independent operators

Checked four ways (page IDs, landing domains, creative style, corporate identity) plus a full infrastructure diff (registrar, nameservers, A records, MX, SPF, site-verification tokens). No overlap at any layer. The only connection is keyword adjacency: tryastro's /help page ranks position 25–49 for “respontika soulmate” — TryAstro capturing a competitor's brand traffic, not shared ownership. Residual uncertainty: a common media buyer or affiliate network behind both cannot be excluded from public data, and nothing observed suggests one.

Ours is the third architecture and the most chargeback-resistant of the three. Worth noting that TryAstro's Terms go out of their way to promise no recurring charge — they appear to be deliberately positioning against exactly Respontika's failure mode, even while their own checkout fine print contradicts it.

Takeaways for our lane

1. They own the exact product name. Buyers searching our product name will find their complaint pile. Worth knowing before we scale brand-term spend.
2. Their deliverable is the weak point. Text, not a portrait, and often nothing at all. An actually-drawn, actually-delivered portrait is a genuine differentiator, and their 838-review complaint pile is free proof that the demand is real and unmet.
3. Test one no-VO, text-only cut against our current format. The format is the hypothesis, not the script.
4. Audit our own portal cancel path. A working, obvious, one-click cancel is cheap insurance against the exact failure mode that produced their BBB alert.
5. If we disclose AI, the disclosure and the persona must agree. Their disclosure is real and prominent and they still take the hit, because the persona cards oversell what the fine print disclaims.
6. Watch Staroly, not just Respontika. Same operator, same machine, clean brand, no complaint history attached yet. If the Respontika name becomes unusable, Staroly is the continuation.
7. ⭐ They solved LTV with a content backend, not a higher sketch price. Across three sketch arms the entry never moves above CA$1–$5. The 28-day Challenge is a CA$9.99–CA$29.99 term subscription for a four-module course, sold to people already on the list. That is the compliant half of their model and the most portable finding in this recon: a term-billed content product fits our existing Upsell Checkout v2 rail better than another one-time OTO does, because the rail already does one-tap charges against a saved card.

Open threads

• Staroly currency ambiguity — a bare $ on the arm carrying 55% of modelled volume. Resolving it moves the mid-case revenue model by ~20% (~$600k/yr). Highest-value open item on this page.
• Arm C steps 27–28 are DOM-sourced, not live-walked. The monthly arm's real post-purchase path is unconfirmed.
• Whether the Challenge product is actually sold into the sketch list, and through which channel, is unconfirmed — no on-funnel cross-sell exists.
• Whether Spiritika appears in the footer of the USD and EU sketch arms is unknown; the dual-entity footer was observed only on the Challenge arm, from a Canadian session.
• Delaware registry check for “Respontika Inc.” is UNREACHABLE, not negative — the query method failed its own known-good control, so no inference is available. Needs a browser-driven session or a paid source.
• 33 of 83 Meta actives unparsed (near-certain duplicates). 3 of 5 live video assets and 1 of 5 statics not visually analysed.
• Paywall variants of the remaining funnel arms (monthly-50c, /funnels/main) uncaptured — both captured live 2026-08-22, see arms C and D. Prices on arms B–D were captured in CAD from a Canadian session — the USD, UK and EU arms are still not captured, and complaint reports cite $10 / $14.99 / $29.99 / $39.99 / £12.99 / €9.90 across ten countries. Staroly's own reputation profile not examined.
• Ad copy for the 380 responsive display units not captured — their assets load async; only the 71 archived-image creatives are directly readable. The 8 read are a sample, not a census.
• Spiritika's shareholders are not in the free Cyprus record. Statement descriptor and payment processors unknown without a live test purchase — none was made.
• ATC field 13 read as region count is inferred from its distribution only Unverified.

step 01 landingstep 02 social proofstep 03 q01 genderstep 04 q02 interested instep 05 q03 soulmate agestep 06 q04 ethnicitystep 07 q05 loyaltystep 08 q06 empathystep 09 q07 physical attractionstep 10 q08 elementstep 11 q09 dobstep 12 interstitial 98pctstep 13 q10 important nowstep 14 interstitial deeperstep 15 q11 red flagstep 16 q12 similar contraststep 17 q13 relationship stylestep 18 q14 feelstep 19 q15 fearstep 20 q16 life goalsstep 21 loaderstep 22 email capturestep 23 promo codestep 24 paywall astep 24 paywall fullstep 24 paywall top headerstep 25 direct upsell astep 25 direct upsell fullstep 26 decline speedup downsell

The same 16-question quiz template as arm B, screen for screen — same element question, same personalization summary, same loader, same email gate, no photo gate. The variable being tested is the paywall, not the quiz. Ladder: CA$1.00 for 7 days (billed as two transactions of $0.40 and $0.60) → CA$39.99/month until cancelled, coupon RESPONTIKA97 auto-applied, descriptor respontika.com, 30-day guarantee. Step 25–26 show the card-entry modal carrying the retention line “91% of users stay with us after the initial 7-day period.”

Consent text, verbatim: “…you authorize us to charge an amount of CA$1.00, which will be processed consecutively as two separate transactions in the amounts of $0.40 and $0.60. Upon expiration of the 7-day trial period, unless canceled beforehand, your selected subscription automatically starts as a monthly plan. A promotional discount will apply, and you will be charged CA$39.99 for the first monthly plan. Starting from the second monthly plan, the full price of CA$39.99 per month will apply… The payments will be listed on your bill as respontika.com.”

Steps 27 and 28 are amber for a reason. They were sourced from the DOM via a leftover session, not walked live on this arm. They confirm the shared /upsells/soulmate ($10.99) and /upsells/timer ($10.99, “SAVE 50%” from $21.98) routes still exist and are reachable — they do not prove those routes fire on the monthly arm's own post-purchase path.

landingreviewsq01of16 genderq02of16 interested inq03of16 soulmate ageq04of16 ethnicityq05of16 loyaltyq06of16 empathyq07of16 physical attractionq08of16 elementq09of16 dobpersonalization summaryq10of16 important nowinterstitial deeperq11of16 red flagq12of16 similar or contrastq13of16 relationship styleq14of16 how want to feelq15of16 biggest fearq16of16 life goalsloader profileemail capturepromo code 97pctpaywall fullcard entry fullpagecard entry viewportupsell soulmateNot live-verifiedupsell timerNot live-verified

Not a sketch funnel. This arm sells an astrology/ritual self-improvement course in four weekly modules (week 1 = “Foundations and Mindfulness”) — their retention and LTV backend. The quiz is 6 questions instead of 16, with no interstitials, no fake-progress screen and no photo gate: a qualification form, not a sunk-cost machine. Ladder: no trial, direct subscription at CA$9.99 / 1 month, CA$19.99 / 3 months (pre-selected default, “Most Popular”, struck from CA$29.97) or CA$29.99 / 6 months (struck from CA$59.94, “Save 50%”), auto-renewing per term.

Consent text, verbatim (3-month default): “By paying for your plan you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and that you will automatically be charged CA$19.99 every 3-months, unless you cancel your subscription before the renewal date through the ‘Billing Info’ section in your account or by emailing us at support@respontika.com. The payment will be listed on your bill as respontika.com.”

Two details to look for in the shots. step-07 is marked CROSSREF because the personalization card inside this non-sketch funnel still says “Done to your Soulmate sketch” and “Palm reading goal” — shared template, never proofread. And the footer on step-10 discloses both Respontika Inc. and Spiritika Limited, where the sketch arms name only Respontika Inc.

landingq01of06 genderq02of06 discoverq03of06 relationship statusq04of06 dobq05of06 elementpersonalization summary CROSSREFemail captureloader readingpaywall fullcard entry fullpagecard entry viewportplan select checkplan 1month selectedplan 6month selected

This set was re-captured on 2026-08-21 after two earlier attempts produced wrong-tab and step-shifted images. Filenames are now verified against the quiz's own “n / 16” progress counter, so the step order and the screen labels below can be trusted Counter-verified

landing introq01of16 genderq02of16 interested inq03of16 soulmate ageq04of16 ethnicityq05of16 loyaltyq06of16 empathyq07of16 physical attractionq08of16 animal energyq09of16 dobinterstitial 98pct summaryq10of16 most important nowinterstitial lets go deeperq11of16 red flagq12of16 similar or contrastq13of16 relationship styleq14of16 how want to feelq15of16 biggest fearq16of16 life goalsloader creating profileemail capturepaywall apaywall full

static 01 see your soulmates facestatic 02 tattoo theyll draw the person youll marrystatic 03 split got this sketch met him 3 months laterstatic 04 locket check your soulmate face

Read directly from tpc.googlesyndication.com. creative-img-01 and -02 are the two live search text ads; -03 to -06 are display and app-install units; -07 and -08 are the retired March 2026 search ads pointing at the now-404 /soulmate/drawing and /soulmate/sketch landing pages.

creative img 01creative img 02creative img 03creative img 04creative img 05creative img 06creative img 07creative img 08

atc aaecom overviewatc ad 01atc ad 02atc ad 03atc ad 04atc ad 05atc ad 06atc overview

Brand 03 · captured 2026-08-22/23AppNebula / Nebula

The FTC case — docket, money, and the compliance floor it sets

Full docket pulled 2026-08-23 from CourtListener: 37 PDFs, ten of them substantive (177 pages). The Cyprus entities that own Nebula defaulted. Obrio Ltd., Spiritual Nebula Ltd., GM Unicorn Corp. Ltd. and director Skianis filed nothing, retained no counsel, and appeared at neither the June 18 nor the July 2 hearing; the preliminary injunction against them was entered unopposed on 2026-07-02 (Dkt 44). Only the US-facing Delaware shells and the five US-resident individuals lawyered up (Kronenberger Rosenfeld) and stipulated — and stipulating bought them no softer conduct terms: the prohibited-conduct language in both orders is word-for-word identical. It kept them out of a contested ruling, nothing more. No receiver was sought or appointed (confirmed by direct search across the complaint, TRO and both PIs). Next dates: CMC statement due 2026-08-25, initial case management conference 2026-09-01 (Oakland, videoconference); the 07-02 hearing transcript becomes free on 2026-10-13.

Yolo Brothers pleads ignorance of the funnel it billed for. Its Answer (Dkt 49, 2026-07-30) admits the Delaware entities “were Delaware corporations used for US payment processing for US customers” and that Yolo Brothers “resold subscription offers to consumers in the United States” — then answers “lack knowledge or information sufficient to admit or deny” to every substantive Nebula funnel allegation (¶¶114–130: the quiz, the fake analysis, the name-your-price page, the $45/30d ladder, the cancellation failures, the $37.4M). The defense strategy is to sever the US billing shells from the Cyprus operators.

Revenue by product — US consumers, PayPal only Measured — FTC complaint

Card volume is additional and nowhere stated. US PayPal is roughly 42% of the five products' ~$250M global revenue. The astrology funnel out-earns the fitness, productivity, fashion and PDF lines individually. The house price shape across all five verticals is identical: a sub-$20 — often sub-$2 — entry converting to $40–$60/month. PDF Guru's $0.99 entry carries the highest recurring at $49.99/mo.

The dispute-suppression script (¶110, pleaded on Lumi but a group-level technique) is a do-not-copy with high diagnostic value — it is what a processor-pressured operator in this niche does under stress:

“Kindly note that the dispute process may take up to 20 days. However, if you cancel the dispute in PayPal, we are committed to processing a refund instantly and you will receive your funds within 72 hours.” — and the FTC pleads the other half: “Lumi frequently continues to refuse refunds even after the PayPal disputes are closed.”

The compliance floor — now the enforced standard for the category

Identical language in all three orders, and note the scope: “any goods or services” — not just subscriptions, not just astrology. The three bans are: disclose all material terms clearly and conspicuously; obtain express informed consent before charging; provide simple mechanisms to stop recurring charges. The court's eight-part “Clearly and Conspicuously” definition is what to hold our own pages against. Three elements matter most:

• Element 4 — unavoidable. “In any communication using an Interactive Electronic Medium… the disclosure must be UNAVOIDABLE.” Our SS Bump 2 rule (transparent recurring in three places) already satisfies this.
• Element 7 — uncontradicted. “Must not be contradicted or mitigated by, or inconsistent with, anything else in the communication.” This is the element Nebula actually failed. Their fine print was already ROSCA-shaped in March 2026; what broke it was burying that text under a name-your-price screen and contradicting it on the payment form with “You will be charged only $5.” Correct disclosure text does not cure a contradicting page.
• Element 8 — measured against the TARGETED audience. If the practice targets a specific group, “reasonable consumers” means members of that group. Our avatars are by design emotionally activated. A disclosure a calm shopper would notice is not automatically clear and conspicuous to the audience we deliberately target. This raises our bar above the generic standard, not to it.

The count worth auditing ourselves against is V: can a customer stop a recurring charge from inside our portal, without emailing anyone? That is the count the FTC pleads hardest and the one Nebula most obviously fails.

Still paywalled and cheap. Dkt 8's 19 attachments — the FTC investigator's declaration, both exhibit volumes (~43 annotated funnel screenshots, of which Figs. D.1–D.6 are the complete Nebula flow), and 14 consumer-witness declarations — are $35.00 total on PACER and nobody has bought them into RECAP. PACER waives quarterly charges of $30 or less, so the $9.00 slice (investigator declaration + both exhibit volumes) is effectively free; the full set is not. Not purchased.

The company — a BVI parent over a Cyprus / Delaware shell stack

The “AppNebula is OBRIO” read is correct but incomplete. Obrio is the app developer of record; the money and merchant accounts run through a separate stack. The FTC's own words: “The Cyprus companies market to U.S. consumers and access U.S. payment processing through counterparts incorporated in Delaware.”

The Skianis mechanism. Stamatis Skianis is director of all Cyprus defendants and, per the complaint (¶19), “director and/or secretary of over 100 other companies registered in Cyprus… manages… merchant account relationships… communicating with PayPal, for example, to appeal account limitations.” The nominee-director layer whose job is opening and defending merchant accounts — the same shell-proliferation the FTC pleads: “continually register new companies and open fresh merchant accounts to avoid fraud monitoring programs” — made possible because the group's co-CEO owns the processor. Four legal identities span one funnel: the Terms name nobody, the Privacy Policy names Beku (HK), the Money-Back Policy names Spiritual Nebula (CY), Google bills as GM Unicorn (CY), and the statement reads Yolo Brothers.

The funnel — live-walked 2026-08-23, no payment made

Walked on appnebula.co/soulmate-sketch/prelanding (female persona, real-inbox session). Paywall, price ladder and consent reached and documented; the card screen was blocked by a client-side bug (below), not a hard-rule stop. A second pass the same night read the page's own funnel-builder config and resolved client state — which is where the real architecture is.

• Subscription-first from screen one. Prelanding subhead: “Take this quiz to enroll in and personalize your Nebula subscription” — unlike Respontika's reveal-first framing. Hero reuses a palm-scanner visual from Nebula's palmistry line.
• 15-question quiz, one continuous section, two answer-reactive affirmation interstitials. No face/palm-scan gate despite the palm-scanner art.
• A genuinely engineered DOB input: an iOS-style 3D scroll-wheel built on CSS 3D transforms that responds only to TouchEvent momentum physics — ignoring click, pointer and wheel events. More anti-automation cost than either prior competitor's flat dropdowns.
• Server-side email allowlist gate — stricter than any prior teardown. A real-time validate call rejected a disposable domain, an RFC-reserved domain, and a real custom-domain business address — all in 8 milliseconds, too fast for a live MX lookup. Deduced to be a local allowlist of major consumer providers (Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/iCloud). Neither Respontika nor TryAstro validates email at all.

The paywall we were served Live-captured 2026-08-23

No price-choice screen appeared — straight to a single fixed-price offer at appnebula.co/soulmate-sketch/trialPayment. The primary CTA (“START MY TRIAL”) names no dollar amount; the breakdown sits only in the fine print. No countdown timer. Named renewal date, explicit recurring amount, three cancel channels — a genuinely ROSCA-shaped disclosure, and a bucket assignment, not a reform.

“By clicking ‘START MY TRIAL’, you agree to enroll in an automatically renewing subscription. You will pay $13.67 today for the first 7 days, then unless you cancel before 2026-08-30, you’ll automatically be charged $49.99 every 30 days. To avoid future charges, you must cancel before your next subscription renewal date. Cancel by visiting your account settings at Manage Subscription, emailing support@asknebula.com, or calling +15047388774. See Subscription Terms.” — verbatim consent text, trialPayment page

What is actually in the config — the screen the FTC pleaded is still there Config-confirmed · not live-verified on screen

One call the page makes for itself returns the entire soulmate-sketch funnel definition — every tier, every upsell, every consent variant in every language, and 105 distinct named flow configurations. The default_flow screen sequence runs onboarding → trialChoice → trialPayment → upsellsSplit → upsells. Screen trialChoice (screenType: TRIAL_CHOICE_PALMISTRY_V2) is the price-choice mechanic, and its config reads, verbatim:

Title: “Choose a price that feels right for you” · section label “Choose a trial price” · CTA button “See my sketch”
The guilt-line: “This option will help us support those who need to select the lowest trial prices!”

That is a price-anchoring screen that frames the cheapest option as being for people who need it, so a self-respecting user avoids the lowest, most honest price. It is a direct match for what the FTC pleaded. And it is not a leftover: the Internet Archive captured Nebula's funnel-builder config on 2026-06-08 — four days after the TRO and the asset freeze — still carrying the identical guilt-line string (×8), the “GET MY RESULTS” pay button (×14), timeUpOffers (×11), secret_discount (×42), and the opening of the exact disclosure pleaded at ¶118 — “You are enrolling in monthly subscription to NEBULA service” — ×10. The price-choice screen survives too, retitled to “Choose a Trial Price” (×8). Every count here was re-run against the archived bytes, not carried over. The capture is re-fetchable:

http://web.archive.org/web/20260608165147/https://gateway-c.appnebula.co/api/v7/gateway/funnel-builder/external/funnels?funnel_link=%2Fastrocartography-discovery&flow_name=&language=en
— confirmed live 2026-08-23: HTTP 200, 292,629 bytes, application/json

The archived diff — with sourcing labels, and what cannot be sourced at all

🟢 PRIMARY = archived production artifact, timestamped and re-fetchable · 🟡 LIVE = our own session, one variant, not archived · 🔴 UNSOURCED = the FTC's characterization in prose, not a captured artifact.

Read the last two rows as the weak line they are. The price change is the one claim in this teardown with no primary source on either end. The archived configs carry offer names and resolve the numbers from a separate pricing call the crawler never made — a regex for $nn.nn across all five archived configs returns zero matches, re-run and confirmed. The “before” is the FTC's prose; the “after” is one live session. Do not quote the $5 → $45 versus $13.67 → $49.99 shift as a measured change.

The harder limit: no same-funnel before/after of the paywall exists at all. Across the entire Internet Archive there is not one capture of any paywall or price-choice page dated after the FTC filing — all 31 captures of */trialChoice and */trialPayment across every Nebula funnel predate 2026-06-02. The reason is structural: crawlers reach prelanding because it is ad-linked and shared, and essentially never reach a paywall sitting 27 screens deep behind a quiz. What rescued this pass is that the crawler did capture the funnel-builder config API responses — five of them, four pre-filing and one post-freeze.

⭐ The consent text before and after — and the one transferable lesson

What the FTC pleaded as the inadequate disclosure (complaint ¶118, describing pre-suit conduct):

“You are enrolling in monthly subscription to NEBULA service. By clicking ‘Get my reading’, you agree that if you don't cancel prior to the end of the 7-day trial for $5 you will automatically be charged $45 every 30 days until you cancel in settings. The charge will appear on your bill as NEBULA. Learn more about cancellation and refund policy in Subscription policy.”

What was still in their production config on 2026-06-08, four days after the TRO and asset freeze (key trialDisclaimer):

“You are enrolling in monthly subscription to NEBULA service. By continuing you agree that if you don't cancel prior to the end of the 7-day trial for the {{selectedOfferTrialPriceWithCurrencySymbol}}, you will automatically be charged {{selectedOfferPriceWithCurrencySymbol}} every 30 days until you cancel in settings. The charge will appear on your bill as appnebula.co. Learn more about cancellation and refund policy in Subscription policy”

Same sentence, same structure, same closing link label. Three changes only: the button phrase moved from “Get my reading” to “continuing”, the two hardcoded prices became template variables, and the descriptor changed from NEBULA to appnebula.co. The disclosure the FTC sued over was still deployed, essentially intact, four days into the asset freeze. And the pre-filing config carried three disclaimer variants that were already ROSCA-shaped in their wording — naming the trial length, the auto-renewal, the recurring amount, the descriptor and the cancellation route.

Correction to the earlier lane, noted explicitly rather than silently absorbed. brand-company.md §4 recorded: “Checked and NOT found: no evidence of … APPNEBULA.CO as descriptor strings.” That is wrong and is now corrected. appnebula.co is a billing-descriptor string in their own production config — ×44 in the 2026-03-22 capture and present again post-TRO. The group has run at least four descriptor strings: NEBULA, appnebula.co, an unspecified “Nebula-branded descriptor”, and Yolo Brothers on statements. Every one of them is a name the buyer never saw on the page where she paid.

The ladder — four trial prices against two recurring prices

The discount tier needs no round-trip. The fully-priced discountOffer object is already sitting in the page's resolved client state alongside the offer we were shown — revealing it is a pure front-end state swap, zero additional network call. Architecturally that is a decline-recovery pattern worth copying (our Upsell v2 failure ladder) even though their use of it is not. The same full / mid / secret-discount three-tier structure repeats across every upsell product — Ultra Pack $29.99 / $14.99 / $7.99, tarot and palmistry $19.99 / $9.99 / $4.99, numerology $14.99 / $7.99 / $3.99, consultation $35.00 with a $6.99 one-week fallback. This is a house-wide pricing architecture, not a soulmate-sketch quirk.

105 variants, chosen by cookie — and a failed A/B fetch is not the explanation. On the first walk, growthbook.nebulahoroscope.com CORS-failed on every load. On the re-verification pass it returned 304 Not Modified — a real success — and we were still routed straight to trialPayment with no trialChoice and no discount tier. Identical routing under both conditions, with a nearly empty resolved feature-flag object and zero experiment assignments. Bucketing is most plausibly decided by the split_id cookie already on the session. The config names default_flow_old_paywall, default_flow_new_paywall_v1, _v2, and one flow literally called flow_1_ab_gs_ss_trial_choice_tier_value_2_jc_0426. Flow variants grew after enforcement, not shrank: 8 named flows on 2026-03-22, 105 on 2026-08-23.

Three geo-conditional legal entities — and a mismatch on our own session

Our rendered paywall footer displayed Beku Limited (Hong Kong) — the entity the config restricts to CN/HK/SG — on a session that was Canadian by every other signal. By the vendor's own rule we should have seen Spiritual Nebula Limited. Either a front-end bug that renders the first array entry without evaluating the condition, or their geolocation misclassifying us; not distinguished. Either way it is an observed instance of a buyer shown a legal-entity disclosure that contradicts the vendor's own documented rule — a disclosure-accuracy defect independent of the pricing question.

The pre-FTC funnel map, and the checkout bug

The archived 2026-03-22 config yields the complete 37-screen pre-FTC flow. Two details are worth more than the rest of the map: email is captured at screen 24, three screens before any price is shown — they own the lead before the ask; and additionalDiscount → trialPaymentWithDiscount is a built-in decline-recovery ladder, the same shape as our Upsell v2 failure ladder, wired in at config level. The archive also shows the deceptive screens are English-market-specific, verified by direct count against the archived bytes: the Italian config carries 0 guilt-lines and 0 “GET MY RESULTS” while still shipping timeUpOffers ×11 and secret_discount ×26; the Spanish config, 0 and 0 against timeUpOffers ×16 and secret_discount ×41. The pricing machinery ships everywhere; the guilt construction ships only in English — which is where the FTC's jurisdiction lives.

The checkout bug. “START MY TRIAL” is visible, focusable and unobstructed but never navigates — while a sibling “Manage Subscription” link on the same page clicks fine. Reproduced on a fresh reload with growthbook resolving successfully, so a failed feature-flag fetch is demonstrably not the sole cause. The card screen, the on-screen descriptor and the decline-path downsell were never reached, and the discountOffer trigger remains untested. A genuine gap, not a papered-over one.

Voice of customer — 1.5 versus 4.3, and what it costs them

The split, measured, with its denominator stated. 1,700 app-store reviews pulled (Apple US/GB/CA + Google Play US), deduplicated, then sliced to the 343 rated ≤2 stars. A keyword classifier left 74 unclassified; all 74 were read by hand. Result:

Categories overlap, so shares exceed 100%. A 6.4 : 1 money-to-quality ratio. Trustpilot, classified the same way, lands independently in the same place (appnebula.co 92.4% money; asknebula.com 71.7%). Three corpora, one answer. This corrects the prior recon estimate of “~100% billing, ~0% quality” — quality is a real 14%, and it is mostly “the reading was generic” and “the advisor stalled to burn my credits,” not “the sketch was bad.”

The sketch-specific finding — this is the opening

79 of 1,700 reviews mention the sketch: 37 at 5★, 11 at 4★, 2 at 3★, 1 at 2★, 28 at 1★. Of those 28 one-star mentions, essentially all describe non-delivery or the rebill — “never delivered the sketch, which was the only reason to engage”, “ads are about a sketch you can never find on the app”, “I was then told I had to download the mobile app to access the sketch. After downloading the app, there was no sketch available anywhere.” Exactly one complaint in the entire corpus is about likeness. We deliver ours in a gated portal within 24 hours; that single operational fact neutralizes most of their one-star sketch corpus.

Delight is recognition, not beauty. The praise is never “what a nice drawing” — it is always “I know this face.” “I just knew the first second I saw the sketch” · “He looks like my guy I'm with right now. Only without the glasses.” · “My soul sketch was a little scary. It was on point.” The word buyers reach for is scary, and they mean it as praise. A face specific enough to read as someone beats a conventionally attractive one. And the written reading is the safety net: buyers repeatedly forgive a missed likeness when the description lands (“The physical sketch is off… but the love language is spot on!”). Invest in the text at least as heavily as the image. Honest framing outperforms overclaiming — “it does say I've yet to meet them but it will be soon. I am actually very intrigued now” — which matches our standing about-to-begin timeline directive.

Their advisor economics — the insider signal

“I get paid a whopping 30 cents a minute if… IF. It's not a free user.” · “Out of the 50 hours I have worked, without the sign on bonus, I made $40.” · “This week, after working 10 hours, I got $5.” — a working Nebula advisor, r/tarot

A gig marketplace at ~$0.30/min carrying a heavy free-user burden. Quality and consistency cannot hold at that rate. The same thread reports AI follow-up DMs (“when you get a DM after we stopped speaking hours later — that's not the advisor. That's AI”), and the per-minute meter turns their own product into the customer's adversary — “time-milking” is a distinct negative cluster. A consistent, well-written character voice on a flat-price deliverable is a durable advantage, not a nice-to-have. Notably, “is this AI” barely registers — 11 of 343 negatives (3.2%), and mostly as an explanation for a delivery failure. Do not over-invest in defending against it; invest in delivering.

Honest caveats. The 4.3 is partly a support artifact — the company replies to 100% of reviews and appears to solicit rating updates after refunding, and several 5-star appnebula.co reviews contain outright complaints. A semantic near-duplicate check across 336 positives found 2 paraphrase pairs (1.2%), so treat the glossiest 5-star reviews with mild suspicion. Sampling is recency-sorted (last 2–4 months, not lifetime; lifetime iOS average is 4.574 across 170,586 ratings). This corpus is post-purchase language — strong on what she says after she pays, thin on “why I clicked.” The pre-purchase counterpart is the TikTok lane below. The 38-phrase customer language bank lives in recon/voice-of-customer.md §8.

TikTok — the pre-purchase lane

570 unique videos (359,037,564 plays) and 10,671 deduplicated comments, pulled 2026-08-23. This is the counterpart corpus to the reviews above: voice-of-customer is what she says after she pays, TikTok is what she says before. The two phrase banks share zero entries.

Three accounts running your person is coming, here is when convert roughly half their comment section into an act of acceptance. Three accounts running here is the face, here is the proof convert zero — not a low number, zero, across 1,843 substantive comments. The mechanism: a prediction is an offer, and the comment section's job becomes accepting it. A proof is a falsifiable assertion, and its job becomes adjudicating it. Show a face and claim it is her soulmate and you have handed the audience a verdict to render. They render it.

“She is in love with him and described him to ChatGPT” — 164,012 likes. The single most-liked comment in the entire 10,671-comment corpus is a debunk, and it sits under a sketch reveal.

Behind it, the same reflex all the way down: “He just drew a generic white guy 😂” (86,209) · “fake or fake” (48,835) · “nah it's too good to be true” (15,192) · “The app has access to your device's gallery… nothing special” (5,029).

Nebula is organically absent — and the niche belongs to someone else entirely

Nebula holds 0.06% of the 359M plays in this corpus — two videos, 203,652 plays. Profile lookups confirm it is not a sampling artifact: @appnebula does not exist; @asknebula exists with 4 followers and 0 videos; @nebula has 11 followers and 0 videos. The operator that took $37.4M through one payment rail buys every single impression and has no organic surface at all on the platform where its product's demand lives. That is an exposure, not a strategy.

Etsy is the largest named channel in the corpus, and not one of the four teardowns in this series anticipated it — 31.3M plays of people buying soulmate sketches from individual Etsy sellers (“I paid a Etsy witch to draw my soulmate here's how it went”, 3.16M plays). A distribution surface, a price anchor and a competitor class we have never assessed. The dominant individual operator is Tina Aldea (@tinapsychic11) — 59,509,470 plays from 15 videos on only 36,531 followers, converting through a bio link to officialtinaaldea.com/soulmate; her top post at 22.5M plays is “POV: you tried the sketch and now he's your boyfriend 👀💘”. The app layer works entirely through seeded creators: @starla.app has 10,382 followers and zero videos, all its reach coming from creators tagging #starla. Only 4 of 570 videos carry #promo and exactly 1 carries #ad, yet those 4 hold 15.4M plays — undisclosed paid seeding at scale. Bio link is the near-universal conversion path (49 of 570 videos say “link in bio”; 3 use a comment-or-DM mechanic). And two free substitutes are eating the bottom of the market: ChatGPT is repeatedly offered in comments as the free version, and CapCut templates appear in 8 videos totalling 9.2M plays.

No voiceover — now evidenced twice, from opposite directions

Transcripts for the 16 highest-reach on-topic videos, with the four biggest silent ones re-run through AI transcription to separate “no captions” from “no speech”: 10 of 16 are silent even under AI transcription, 3 are music-only, 2 carry one spoken line, and exactly 1 of 16 is a full talking-head voiceover. Nebula's flagship paid ad is a talking-head voiceover — the gray-haired male artist, 28 seconds — and they bought 503 duplications of it. The format the market leader spent most heavily on is the format organic reach almost never rewards.

The organic hook shape, verbatim from the descriptions that earned the reach: “guys.. what the heck😅” (7.69M) · “am I crazy or does it look like @corey” (11.66M) · “WHO IS THIS MAN. #FINDHIM” (4.45M) · “I KNOW YOU SEE IT 😭” (2.11M) · “It was only $6 lol” (9.86M). First person, present tense, addressed to friends, stating confusion rather than a claim, ending on a question the viewer answers. Not one asserts the sketch is accurate — they ask, and the comment section does the work. Winners are cloned verbatim, not adapted: two creators ran a word-for-word identical script to 7,688,628 and 2,038,370 plays. And the one long-form talking head that worked captioned it “maybe it's ai maybe it's not but it sure was fun” — pre-conceding the objection bought affectionate comments instead of adversarial ones. Conceding uncertainty up front is the price of admission here, and it is cheaper than being adjudicated.

The trend is past peak — down 89%, and the peak was a filter

Median reach per post fell 107,551 → 11,758 — an 89% drop — on roughly half the posting volume. Decayed, not dead: 2026-H1 still produced a 7.6M-play video. And the peak was driven by a native TikTok filter, not a product — 31 videos mentioning “filter” carry 72,297,088 plays, 20% of all corpus reach from 5% of the videos, and the single largest video in the corpus is @auraman880's “The soulmate pick filter☠️” at 36.2M plays, which sells nothing and links nowhere. The commercial operators rode a native effect; they did not create the demand. Treat TikTok as language and format truth, not as a growth channel. Note too that #twinflame (93 uses) ranks above #soulmatesketch (91) — the same vocabulary gap the Tier 2 SEO cluster identifies.

The “delulu” register — she wants permission, not persuasion

“This sounds too good to be true 🥹 but im delulu so letsgoooo” — 265 likes
“🤷 I can't get anymore delusional so I claim it” — 1,909 likes
“Since I am delulu ❤🥰 I claim it 😁” — 2,999 likes
“you lose aura points if it's over $20” — 2 likes

She does not believe it and she is buying anyway. Naming yourself delusional is the permission structure that makes it safe to want the thing. This is not a skeptic to be converted — she has priced in the risk and decided the hope is worth it. Copy that argues her into belief is solving a problem she does not have; copy that gives her cover to enjoy it is doing the actual job. Two adjacent registers: the For You page read as fate (“Is the universe telling me something? Every time I open tiktok this is what I'm getting”) — she experiences ad delivery as a sign, and it costs nothing to honour. And a price ceiling stated as social law rather than budget — above $20 the purchase stops being cute and starts being embarrassing. Anchors from the wild: “It was only $6 lol” (on a 9.86M-play video), “Is everyone seriously paying $15 for the sketch. 😬”, against “I did the same thing but it cost $50…but she ended up being right and now I'm engaged to him 🥰”. Our $11.11 sits comfortably inside the tolerated band; Tina Aldea's $37–67 does not. Anything at or above $20 needs the outcome story attached in the same breath. The full 44-phrase pre-purchase bank across five intent clusters lives in recon/tiktok-intel.md §6 — zero of the 44 duplicate the 38-phrase post-purchase bank.

Method and owed. 570 unique videos from 36 API calls (ScrapeCreators, deduplicated on aweme_id); 10,671 deduplicated comments from 2 Apify runs; 16 standard transcripts plus 4 AI-fallback; 39 profile lookups. Cost: 112 ScrapeCreators credits (balance measured before and after) plus ≈$4.50 Apify. No browser used. Both Apify runs hit their maxItems caps, so neither exhausted its video set, and the 570 videos came from search ranking, which over-represents winners — every reach figure is “within this corpus,” never platform-wide. Owed, most actionable first: song mining — 13 of the 16 organic winners are carried by a trending song and get_tiktok_song_videos was never called. Then the three operator checkout prices (all JavaScript-rendered, needs the browser lane), reply-level comments (both scrapes ran includeReplies: false), and the Spanish lane (~570 comments and two 3M+ videos unmined).

Distribution

Meta: dark now. 0 of 89 archived ads active; latest flight ended 2026-07-29. Structure is page-per-quiz-product (16 “Nebula: X” pages) plus a layer of 5 fake human-expert persona pages running the aggressive claims the brand pages avoid. The sketch page renamed itself mid-campaign — page 803237582862346 ran as “Soul Sketch” (27 ads) then “Indigo Rose” (14 ads), same likes, same categories: identity laundering on a page with existing trust equity. Sketch did not exist for Nebula before Dec 2025; it was 48% of ad count but only a third of duplication — a bolted-on acquisition angle, tested eight months, then lapsed. Audience skewed younger than ours (18–34 ≈ 77%), gender targeting “All” on every ad.

Google: industrial scale. appnebula.co is a deliberate noindex zero; the organic business lives on asknebula.com (~274k visits/mo, ~$666k/mo est. value). One advertiser, GM UNICORN CORPORATION LIMITED, ~40K–100K ads; 13 search creatives ran continuously for ~34 months — proven evergreen winners. Five live quiz funnels on one codebase, 29 locales. They rank #1 on their own cancellation queries. The “soulmate sketch” SERP has zero paid ads (8,100/mo, CPC $1.93) — open ground Nebula itself does not bid, though the absence is more likely a Google category-policy constraint than an oversight. Bing: a live UET tag (52008507) sits on every prelanding page.

The SEO moat — and the wedge they left open

Measured from a complete census, not a sample: DataForSEO returned 383 ranking pages whose ETV sums to exactly 273,806/mo, matching the domain total. Page families come from the live sitemap index (1,292 URLs, nine child sitemaps).

• The two domains are sealed, not merely separate. asknebula.com contains zero references to appnebula.co on any page fetched. The organic domain runs its own on-domain quiz at /flow/lp/simple-registration. Same company, two front doors that never touch — and a hard prerequisite for us: aggressive funnel copy and ranking content must not share a hostname.
• The moat is much smaller than it looks. Of 1,292 URLs, 846 are psychic-advisor profile pages that earn essentially nothing — 18 of the 846 rank at all, for 19 ETV/mo combined. The real content estate is ~414 pages. Those profiles exist to stock money pages with named practitioners, not to attract traffic.
• Zodiac compatibility is 91 pages producing 38.8% of the entire domain (106,176 of 273,806 ETV/mo). Add the homepage and 92 URLs are 55.6% of everything.
• Hubs out-earn their children 3.5 : 1 per page — 2,389 ETV per sign hub against 691 per pair page. Build the 12 hubs before the 78 pairs.
• Internal linking is one mega-footer, not editorial craft. 123 of every page's ~130 internal links are an identical sitewide module. A top-earning pair page contains exactly one hand-placed link. Clone the footer module first — it is the mechanism.
• The template is rigid and cheap: ~950 body words, exactly 7 H2s in the same slot order, 17 images, no schema. Slot 2 is the whole trick — a hard compatibility percentage that converts an unanswerable question into a screenshottable number. Titles and meta descriptions are hand-written per page even though the body is templated.
• Two free differentiators they leave open: they run FAQPage schema on hub pages but not on the blog posts that actually win the FAQ rankings, and their /{modality}-reading money pages have no H1 at all.

Correction to the earlier lane. The prior read — that angel numbers and aura colors were their genuine wins — came from a 40-row keyword sample. The full census says those two clusters are 0.5% of the domain combined. The real #1-ranking engine is the animal and body-omen “spiritual meaning of…” blog cluster (hummingbird, raccoon, hawk, ladybug-with-no-spots, left-ear-itching): 162 of the domain's 292 first-position rankings, from 53 pages. The real volume engine is zodiac compatibility. The earlier advice — copy the tail, not the head — was directionally right and pointed at the wrong tail.

Creative

The flagship VSL — the best asset in the sweep. Ad 1403995244642771, a 28-second split-screen proof video fronted by a gray-haired male artist in his late 50s (the opposite of our Stella/Lara casting). Full transcript, verbatim:

“Believe it or not, I will draw the person you will marry. One of my clients asked for a refund. She thought the man I sketched looked like her neighbor, but it turned out he was her soulmate. Here is the sketch I created, and here is the man she eventually married. Just three weeks after receiving the sketch, she met him exactly the way I said she would. I can create the same kind of sketch for you, your destined soulmate. It might be someone you already know, or it could be the face you’re yet to meet, along with when and where it will happen.”

The structural move is the refund story as proof: the scam objection is voiced by a customer inside the ad, then inverted into the strongest possible proof. It makes no outcome promise and narrates one anecdote — compliance-safe and directly portable to Stella. And it is independently confirmed by their own review corpus, where the highest-credibility testimonial shape is the one that opens with the objection. The proof beat is three split-screen sketch↔photo overlays across young, middle-aged and elderly couples, quietly widening the target. On Google Ads Transparency the same hook now runs as a live evergreen static (creative CR02612393319258390529, last shown 2026-08-22): headline “THIS WILL GIVE GOOSEBUMPS. I WILL DRAW THE PERSON YOU’LL MARRY”, button “TAKE TEST.” The RSA search ads (“Find Love Written in Stars”, “Meet Your Soulmate Today”, shared description “Discover who your soulmate is with a custom sketch in just few minutes”) land straight on the soulmate-sketch prelanding.

step 01 prelanding fullstep 02 social proofstep 03 q01of15 genderstep 04 q02of15 partner genderstep 05 q03of15 partner agestep 06 q04of15 ethnicitystep 07 q05of15 dob picker initialstep 07 q05of15 dob setstep 07b dob after drag teststep 08 q06of15 qualitiesstep 08b q06of15 qualities selectedstep 09 affirmation wellnotedstep 10 q07of15 looks importancestep 11 q08of15 emotions or logicstep 12 affirmation balancestep 13 q09of15 why didnt workstep 14 q10of15 most difficultstep 15 affirmation struggle realstep 16 q11of15 love languagestep 17 q12of15 future envisionstep 18 q13of15 energystep 19 q14of15 opposites attractstep 20 q15of15 shared experiencesstep 21 email capturestep 21b email capture mediazipstep 22 email mediazip rejectedstep 23 email marketing confirmstep 24 loader onboardingstep 25 trialPayment fullstep 25b trialPayment viewport checkstep 26 trialPayment 1440w full

Nebula is dark on Meta but running hard on Google. The evergreen static (creative CR02612393319258390529, last shown 2026-08-22) carries the headline “THIS WILL GIVE GOOSEBUMPS. I WILL DRAW THE PERSON YOU’LL MARRY” with a “TAKE TEST” button; the RSA search ads (“Find Love Written in Stars”, “Meet Your Soulmate Today”) land on appnebula.co/soulmate-sketch/prelanding.

step 01 advertiser grid anywherestep 02 format filter dropdownstep 03 daterange dropdownstep 04 ad detail rsa english v1step 05 ad detail evergreen koreanstep 06 ad detail video english soulmate

Lane 04 · captured 2026-08-23The App Layer — what Numina builds against

Where satisfaction actually comes from

US App Store ratings via the iTunes lookup API, 2026-08-23. In-app-purchase ranges from the Google Play listings the same day. Note Nebula’s $299.99 ceiling — the category monetises whales through large credit packs.

Signup through to the paywall, captured on a free account. The flow: four onboarding steps with no paywall at all, then a free zodiac profile (Sun, Moon, Ascendant, element, lucky numbers, affirmation) that exists purely to buy trust; the first paywall is metered, not step-gated — three free minutes on any advisor, then 40–50 credits per minute. A zero-credit account is offered exactly one SKU: “Welcome pack — 160 credits — $15.99 → $2.99”, checked out through a Solidgate iframe with no recurring-terms disclosure on the screen (auto-refill lives in a separate settings tab). When free time expires a 59-second countdown modal fires. Shot 17 is their fraud hard-stop delivered in-character as a message from the “psychic” — a pattern we will not copy.

01 signup name02 signup dob03 forgot password sent04 experts home05 settings active offers06 paywall refill credits modal07 settings personal info08 settings auto refill09 settings notifications10 all psychics list11 advisor detail liam12 chat surface preintro13 chat connecting14 chat timer running15 chat first reply16 chat free time expired disabled input17 chat fraud detection hardstop18 urgency countdown modal19 refill credits pack select20 checkout payment method wallet21 checkout credit card form22 horoscope daily today23 horoscope year tab free24 profile zodiac personalization25 favorite empty26 avatar dropdown menu27 faq expanded experts page28 notification special offers detail29 settings legal tab30 manage personal data delete

4.92★. Five tabs: HOME / GROW / ME / TRANSITS / AUDIO. Time-horizon segmentation (TODAY / THIS WEEK / THIS YEAR), a 15-minute weekly audio reading, a 28-day course, date-ranged forecast windows, and a store screenshot devoted entirely to its push-notification voice.

01 birthchart ai free badge02 libra rising placement03 home daily horoscope tabs04 grow 28day course05 weekly audio journal meditation06 transits forecast windowsshot 0708 push notification stack

4.79★ on 206K ratings. Editorial monochrome, blunt one-line daily verdict, a hyper-specific Do / Don’t list, a real friends social graph with per-category compatibility, and commerce as a permanent tab.

01 home do and dont02 you chart placements03 friends compatibilityshot 04shot 05

4.57★. Blue-violet gradient and glossy 3D icons — the weakest identity of the top three. Note the “Your Compatibility Reading is ready” reveal, their re-engagement pattern.

01 spiritual guidance spaceshot 0203 compatibility reading readyshot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07shot 08

4.80★. The strongest per-minute advisor UX: “$4.99 for 5 minutes, a $25+ value” trial banner, reader cards carrying tenure and volume stats (readings delivered, year joined), twin Chat / Call CTAs.

01 40k five star social proofshot 0203 reader profile per minuteshot 04shot 05

3.99★ — the cautionary tale. Clean black-and-sans compatibility flow resolving to a SOULMATE verdict, but the rating fell after previously-free audio went behind a paywall.

shot 0102 compatibility soulmateshot 03shot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07shot 08

4.64★. Moon-phase calendar as the daily spine, with a “Daily Activity” matrix rating today across twelve life areas.

shot 0102 moon phase daily activityshot 03shot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07shot 08shot 09shot 10

4.74★. Live-astrologer marketplace at the largest scale in the category.

shot 01shot 02shot 03shot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07

4.77★. Per-minute psychic marketplace.

shot 01shot 02shot 03shot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07shot 08

4.59★. Mass-market tarot and horoscope, subscription plus credits.

shot 01shot 02shot 03shot 04shot 05shot 06shot 07shot 08

What Numina takes

1. No dark-purple-galaxy aesthetic — both top-rated apps refuse it, and distinctive art direction is itself a rating driver.
2. Push notifications are the product, not plumbing — event-triggered, specific, written in guide voice; this is the mobile app’s entire justification.
3. Time-horizon IA (TODAY / THIS WEEK / THIS YEAR) maps exactly onto our daily card, weekly reading and monthly deep reading.
4. Date-ranged personal forecast windows create calendar-anchored anticipation, and our arrival-timing windows are the same mechanic with a stronger hook.
5. A 28-day course tab — validated twice over, by CHANI’s GROW and Respontika’s Challenge.
6. Audio readings as a first-class format — we already own the character voices.
7. Hyper-specific Do / Don’t daily output beats generic horoscope prose because it is concrete, screenshot-able and shareable.
8. A compatibility or social layer is the only organic viral loop anyone in this category has.
9. Archive access as a feature — our deliverable library already does this, so surface it as a benefit.
10. Never claw back free content — The Pattern’s 3.99★ is what that mistake costs.

Lane 05 · captured 2026-08-24Native App Teardown — inside four competitor apps

Four competitor apps sideloaded onto a Play-certified Android 14 emulator and walked live as the same persona (Mira, 14 May 1990 09:15, New York). No purchase was made and no card was ever entered on any app. Where an app blocked us the blocker is stated, and the source of every substitute fact is named. This is the surface the web teardowns never exposed: the subscription paywalls, the badge and default logic, the cancel flows and the free-tier boundaries.

The four apps

The paywall table — all four, side by side

Not one of the four puts the price on the button. Every one of them ships a bare verb — “Subscribe”, “Join Today” — where the number should be. That is a free differentiator sitting unclaimed in the entire category, and it is also the FTC’s “clear and conspicuous” element the whole set is still failing.

Value before the wall — the sharpest divide

Co-Star’s reveal lands before any account exists, verbatim:

☉ Taurus   ☽ Capricorn   ↑ Cancer
Just wants to cuddle
Homebody
All or nothing, no in-between
“WE USE NASA DATA TO CALCULATE YOUR PLACEMENTS FOR HYPER-PERSONALIZED HOROSCOPES.”

Co-Star’s instant reveal is the single most transferable mechanic in the entire teardown. It earns belief before it asks. Port it directly into the Numina quiz→reveal bridge — and note that it pairs exactly with our existing rule that the face has to be claimable, not correct.

The revenue leader, walked end to end. Three parallel monetisation lanes run in one app: a Google Play subscription in CA$ (weekly CA$10.99 / monthly CA$33.99 / 3-month CA$40.99), a per-minute psychic marketplace in USD ($4.49–$4.99 per minute, framed as “3 minutes FREE then $4.99/min”), and one-time report SKUs at USD $13.99 anchored against $38.99. The subscription screen carries the “HOT DEAL” badge on the weekly plan — the worst value on the screen at CA$571 annualised — and pre-selects it, while every stated savings percentage is accurate. The “What is your Witch Type?” quiz runs ten questions and then blurs out the answer itself behind the $13.99 SKU, with no disclosure text anywhere on that offer. Cancellation is six instruction slides telling you to go find Google’s settings yourself, then it drops you back into Settings; there is no in-app cancel and no deep link. And the paywall footer names a merchant we had not seen anywhere in the FTC docket work: “Yolo Brothers Inc., 500 North Rainbow Blvd, Suite300, Las Vegas, Nevada 89107” — not Genesis Tech, not Obrio, not Spiritual Nebula Limited. Their disclosure paragraph is now genuinely ROSCA-shaped and sits above the button; the architecture around it was never fixed.

01 welcome02 goals top02 onboard step103 goals scrolled04 goals selected05 onboard06 onboard07 focus08 onboard09 onboard10 onboard11 birthdate12 onboard13 onboard14 birthplace15 onboard16 onboard17 onboard18 name19 onboard20 onboard21 onboard22 onboard23 onboard24 push permission25 onboard26 onboard27 onboard28 signup checked29 google signin30 post signin31 after signin32 onboard33 paywall weekly34 paywall monthly35 paywall close36 home today36 home37 home scroll138 home scroll239 free reading40 chat claimed41 chat idle41 chat question42 chat sent43 chat after send44 psychics tab45 psychics scroll46 compatibility47 chatroom48 oracle chat49 readings50 readings scroll51 audio locked52 quiz53 quiz q154 quiz end55 quiz result56 quiz paywall scroll57 today58 settings59 cancel flow60 cancel step160 cancel step260 cancel step360 cancel step460 cancel step560 cancel step660 cancel step760 cancel step862 account details63 home after relaunch64 birthchart65 birthchart result66 unlock reading67 compat68 compat partner69 compat add70 invite partner71 invite share72 paywall again73 play sheet74 back from play75 final state

The cleanest pricing table in the set, attached to the lowest rating in the set. Go Deeper+ shows yearly at CA$8.33 per month (BEST VALUE, pre-selected), quarterly at CA$13.33 (POPULAR), monthly at CA$14.99 — the badges are true, the ordering is fair and the cheapest option is the default. It still sits at 3.99★ while CHANI holds 4.92★, because of what it takes back: the daily insight is truncated mid-article, with the CTA reading Go Deeper+ where every other astrology app ships Read Insight, and the user’s own personality audio gives you chapter 1 then seven padlocks on chapters 2 to 8 — 2:34 of a 39:45 reading of herself. Bonds are metered to three per 24 hours, and tapping a padlocked row does nothing at all. The voice, though, is the closest register in the set to what Numina should hit: the jargon lives in the labels, the psychology lives in the prose, and every card ends on a question.

01 launch02 signup methods03 email signup04 auth methods again05 google signin06 after google07 post google auth08 profile form filled09 birthdate picker10 birthdate set11 birthdate ok12 birthtime picker13 birthtime 0915am14 form complete15 form scrolled16 after next17 birthplace autocomplete18 birthplace selected19 review details20 after review tap21 place ready22 details review23 os notif dialog24 after notif allow25 review summary26 after view my pattern27 trait detail28 read insight29 insight swiped30 airship modal30 home31 home32 tab lens33 lens scroll234 tab indepth35 indepth 236 indepth paywall37 you indepth38 indepth chat reply39 indepth after msgs40 indepth msg241 indepth after 742 indepth quota43 indepth hub44 tab bonds45 create custom friend46 friend filled47 after save friend48 friend place48b friend place dd49 friend saved50 bonds hub51 bond result52 bond scroll153 bond scroll end54 bond exclusive upsell55 after explore now56 start exploring57 you tab58 menu59 settings60 PAYWALL61 paywall scrolled62 play billing sheet63 tab discover64 discover scrolled65 discover item66 listen insight gate67 audio player68 audio ch269 you audio card70 personality audio gate71 audio chapters locked72 locked chapter paywall73 locked tap74 audio player top75 play locked chapter76 bonds count77 bonds remaining info78 get more bonds paywall79 astrology wheel80 your transits81 time travel gate82 time travel picker83 time travel result84 tt year list85 your pattern list86 your pattern list end87 friends screen88 you tab scrolled89 you tab bottom90 go deeper section91 go deeper item92 play listing93 play iap94 lens sign detail95 lens cancer96 lens godeeper paywall

Four onboarding screens, about 90 seconds, and it pays out before asking for anything: birth date, birth time (with an explicit SKIP), birth city, and then a full chart plus three blunt personality verdicts, free, with no account and no payment. Birth time is optional and the privacy line sits on every data screen. Then the wall: phone number plus SMS OTP, or Facebook — no email, no Google, no Apple, no guest mode, which is where our walk stopped. That gate is a growth decision, not an auth decision: the manifest declares READ_CONTACTS and the phone number is the friend-graph key, which is exactly why no email option exists. Items behind the wall — the live Do / Don’t verdict, the SHOP price list, the add-friend flow — are not captured, and the one-time-IAP monetisation shape is inferred from the Play listing, not verified.

01 launch02 welcome03 onboard 01 birthdate03 onboard 0104 onboard 02 birthtime04 onboard 0205 onboard 03 birthplace05 onboard 0306 onboard 0407 onboard 0508 phone filled09 after phone next09 after phone submit10 invalid phone error11 facebook oauth11 facebook signin12 app back at phone wall13 play listing14 play iap15 play about16 play app info17 play app info scrolled18 login only phone or facebook19 play gallery20 play shot121 play shot222 play shot323 play shot424 play shot525 play shot626 play description

The highest-rated app in the category at 4.92★ on 57,446 US ratings, and the honest counterexample to Nebula. $11.99 a month or $107.99 a year badged “25% off monthly cost” — and the badge is true (monthly annualises to $143.88; the annual plan is 24.9% cheaper), with a 14-day trial on monthly and 30 days on annual, and a one-tap deep link straight to Play’s subscription screen to cancel. The free tier is genuinely generous: daily horoscopes, the full birth chart, a 28-day course, the weekly podcast, tarot card, 7-day forecast. Premium gates depth, not basics — CHANI gives away what Nebula charges for and still holds the higher rating at a flat price. Onboarding is inverted against Nebula: account creation comes first, name plus phone plus email plus password, before a single astrology question, and that phone-plus-SMS-OTP wall is where our walk stopped. The pricing, badge, trial and cancel facts above come from CHANI’s own support documentation, which is authoritative; only the in-app paywall pixels are missing.

00 playstore listing01 first screen01 launch02 after promo close03 onboarding start04 onboard 0105 signup filled06 after create07 after create submit08 otp or next08 otp screen09 welcome again10 form no phone11 after create nophone12 play listing

Ship these

1. Value before the wall — Co-Star’s instant reveal, adapted: her sketch or reading lands before any account demand.
2. Price ON the button — “Start · $14.77/mo”. Nobody in the category does it.
3. Honest badge and honest default — if it says best value it must BE best value annualised, and that is what we pre-select. Show the annualised cost of every tier; that is the number Nebula relies on you not computing.
4. Disclosure above the button, dynamic per plan — Nebula’s placement is correct even though their funnel is not. Copy the structure, keep our terms.
5. One-tap cancel in-app — CHANI’s deep link is the floor; ours should cancel in the portal in two taps. This is simultaneously our ROSCA compliance, our underwriting asset and our review-score moat.
6. Generous free basics, paid depth — CHANI’s model. Daily card free forever. Never claw back.
7. Notification primer after the first aha, with a real example push, and no pre-checked box.
8. Labels carry the jargon, prose carries the psychology — The Pattern’s credentialing trick, in Lara’s and Stella’s voices.
9. A real viral loop — Nebula’s pre-created deliverable (the report is waiting when the invitee lands) beats an invite link, and it fits a compatibility or partner feature natively.

Caveats. CHANI and Co-Star were not fully walked — both hard-gate on phone plus SMS OTP we cannot receive. CHANI’s pricing, badge and cancel facts come from CHANI’s own support documentation (authoritative); Co-Star’s monetisation shape is inferred from the Play “per item” label and is explicitly unverified. The Pattern’s Time Travel is advertised as premium but worked free — state it as advertised-locked, not locked. Nebula’s per-minute meter was never seen running (both advisors went Busy); the pricing display is captured verbatim. Ratings mix stores: Co-Star is 4.5★ on Play and 4.79★ on iOS, the others are iOS.

Section 03 · 2026-08-21Revenue Models

Method

Three independent anchors per brand, then reconcile:

1. Review-rate anchor — unsolicited-complaint-heavy Trustpilot profiles typically capture 0.05–0.3% of customers. Reviews/month ÷ rate → customers/month.
2. Ad-footprint anchor — active creative counts and launch velocity imply a spend band typical for this niche; spend ÷ plausible CPA → trials/month.
3. Unit-economics anchor — captured price ladder × typical trial-to-paid conversion, retention, and refund/chargeback drag → net revenue per trial start.

TryAstro (AA ECOM INDUSTRIES LLC) — funnel live ~4.5 months

Observed inputs: 187 active Meta ads (39 launched in one 3-day window — scaling), 17 Google ads; ~106 Trustpilot reviews in ~4 months (~26/mo); price ladder $1 (PWYW $1/$5/$9.95) → $49.99/mo after 7d; OTO ladder $41.97 / $29.97 / $19.97 (+downsells); $12 priority upgrade.

Assumptions (mid case): review rate 0.15% → ~17k trials/mo; trial-to-first-rebill 40%; avg 1.5 paid months at $49.99; refunds + chargebacks 20% of sub revenue; OTO + upgrade attach ~$9/trial start. → Net revenue per trial start ≈ $32 (low $18 / high $48).

Cross-check (ad footprint): buying 17k trials/mo at $20–30 CPA = $340–510k/mo Meta spend (~$11–17k/day) — consistent with a 187-ad single-page account in aggressive scale mode, and with sub-economics that support CPA ≈ first-month value. The high case would need ~$1M+/mo spend: possible but not evidenced. Best guess: ~$5M/yr run-rate and climbing (the funnel is 4.5 months old and its ad velocity is accelerating).

Respontika / Staroly network (Kovexa / Spiritika) — operating ~3 years

Observed inputs: 83 active Meta ads (1-year continuous run, winner-duplication strategy); 452 lifetime Google creatives — peak Nov 2025, dark Jun–Jul 2026, Aug relaunch (31 live); 838 Trustpilot reviews over ~2.5–3 yrs (~25/mo avg); cancellation searches ~1,250/mo ≈ brand searches; four captured price ladders; a shared $10.99 upsell pair; iOS + Android apps.

FX assumptions

Every USD figure below is derived through three constants, stated as assumption, not measurement — approximate August 2026 rates: CAD→USD 0.73, GBP→USD 1.27, EUR→USD 1.09. Monthly-equivalent uses 52/12 = 4.33 weeks per month; multi-month terms are divided by their term length. FX is the second-largest source of error in this model after volume.

Price-architecture matrix — the four arms

Complaint-cited price points across markets

From the ~10-country complaint base. These are buyer reports, not transacted by us, and most do not state the billing interval — which is itself the complaint. Where the interval is unstated, the monthly-equivalent is given both ways Buyer reports

Two things fall out. First, the captured CAD arms sit at the bottom of the observed band, not the middle — ~$29–32/mo in USD against a band reaching $43–63/mo at the stated-weekly reports. Second, the US $29.99 and $39.99 reports are almost certainly the monthly arm reaching US buyers, which arm 3 explains for the first time; before this capture those two rows had no matching captured ladder.

Arm-mix model — volume split

Total current volume is carried unchanged: ~10–12k trial starts/month, anchored on 838 Trustpilot reviews over ~2.5–3 years at a 0.15% review rate (~17k/mo lifetime average), discounted for the Jun–Jul 2026 dark period. Cancellation-search cross-check: ~1,250 cancel-intent searches/mo; if 15–35% of cancelling subscribers search, that implies ~3,500–8,500 cancellations/mo — a churn base of the same order as ~10k starts/mo. Splitting that total across arms is new and unmeasured; every share below is an assumption.

Net per trial start, per arm (mid case)

Shared assumptions: trial fee collected on ~95% of starts (card declines); trial→first-rebill 45% on the weekly arms; refund/chargeback drag 20% of subscription revenue; upsell attach 15% across the $10.99 offer and its timer downsell, at 15% drag. The monthly arm gets two deliberately different assumptions: conversion 35% (the disclosed rebill is 4× larger inside the same 7-day window) and drag 25% (a single CA$39.99 line is the kind of statement entry that produces a dispute, and their own refund policy refuses refunds once a subscription has billed more than once).

Arm 4's weighted first term assumes a 20 / 60 / 20 split across the 1/3/6-month plans, weighting the pre-selected 3-month default: 0.2×CA$9.99 + 0.6×CA$19.99 + 0.2×CA$29.99 = CA$19.99, with auto-renewal collecting 1.35 terms on average.

Where the monthly arm actually changes the answer

At mid-case retention the monthly and weekly arms land in the same place (~$14 per start), because the monthly arm's 4× larger charge is offset by lower assumed conversion and higher assumed drag. The difference shows up in the ceiling, not the midpoint, and it is large:

• A single successful rebill collects CA$39.99 against CA$9.99 on the weekly arm. The floor per converted customer is 4× higher.
• The weekly arm's realistic collection tops out near CA$43–50 (4–5 charges before the cancel decision). Two monthly cycles is CA$80; three is CA$120.
• So in the high case — 50% conversion, 3 months retained, 20% drag — the monthly arm returns ~$38 per trial start against ~$27 for the native weekly arm.

Arm 3 is therefore not a cheaper alternative to the weekly arm, it is a higher-variance one: it converts fewer trials and disputes more of them, and the survivors are worth several times more. Running both simultaneously against the same quiz is a rational hedge, and the VWO install says they are measuring exactly that.

Cases and run-rate

Low = 30% trial→paid, ~3 weekly charges (or 1 monthly), 30% drag, 8% upsell attach, 2% challenge attach. Mid = as above. High = 55% trial→paid (50% monthly), ~7 weekly charges (3 monthly), 15% drag (20% monthly), 25% upsell attach, 12% challenge attach.

The low case has moved down from the previous model's ~$1.1M/yr to ~$0.8M/yr, for the same reason the mid did: the CAD arms are cheaper than the ladder the old model used. The high case is essentially unchanged (~$13M), because at high retention the monthly arm's ceiling makes up what the CAD pricing gives away.

Best guess: ~$3M/yr current run-rate (previously ~$3–4M, now recomputed to the lower half of that band), with a lifetime peak at the Nov 2025 cadence plausibly 1.5–2.5× current, so ~$4.5–7.5M/yr at peak, rebuilding after the mid-2026 dark period. If the Staroly currency caveat resolves to CAD, subtract ~20%: mid becomes ~$2.4M/yr.

What this means for us

Section 04Steal List

Mechanics worth adapting in compliant form, pulled from both teardowns. Structure is portable; their execution mostly is not.

Never copy

Section 05Sources

Everything below is a live external link. Registry and transparency pages are the primary evidence for the identity findings; the Ad Library pages are the handle for re-checking ad volume at any time.