How a private vote, repeated, becomes a verdict.
Two records. One question. Sealed until the date of your choosing. The seven stages below describe the arc of a decision filed through Counsel.day, each anchored on the artefact the stage produces. The prose serves as caption.
James and Alex's first real use of the product was whether to move into the city from a small village in the countryside, for their son's first year of primary schooling. The decision ran for thirty evenings on the first build of the system. The verdict on day thirty was a Lean Yes · different in important ways from a Strong Yes, as the analysis made clear when they read it together the following Saturday morning. The artefacts below are drawn from that decision and from early couples who have run the product since.
The first stage is composition. One of you opens a draft envelope, writes the question that has been on the table, chooses a format (eight options, from a clean Yes/No to a daily ranking of up to six alternatives), and sets the duration. The duration is the second decision the product asks of you, after the question itself: match it to the weight of what you are asking. Once the envelope is filed, the question and the format are immutable for the duration.
The second stage is pairing. The decision creator invites the other partner by name and email; a single-use magic link is delivered (via Brevo) and held for seven days. When the partner accepts the invitation, both stamps land on the record and the evening-vote schedule begins that night. If the invited partner does not accept within seven days, the creator can re-invite, replace the address, or convert the decision to a Solo record.
The third stage is the evening vote. Each evening, at a time you both set, you each receive one prompt. You vote on the same question, privately, with one tap. You can write a sealed note if you have more to say · the note clusters into themes the verdict will read on day N. Once sealed, the vote is immutable; there is no settings panel and no support workflow to change a sealed vote. If you miss a vote, the day is recorded as skipped; the verdict still runs on whatever you did seal.
The fourth stage is the period. Across the duration, the decision accumulates. Each day adds a stamp to your strip and your partner's. You only see your own stamps; your partner's strip is hidden until verdict day. Skipped evenings are not penalised · the trajectory smooths over them. The product sends one gentle reminder if either of you misses three consecutive evenings; beyond that, it does not nag. The cadence is the cadence.
The fifth stage is the seal itself. Until the verdict day, the database does not return your partner's vote or note rows on any query. The check is enforced at the row-level-security policy in Postgres; the application has no service-role bypass in production. Even with full database administrative access, the policy prevents cross-participant reads. The deeper engineering reference lives at engineering/the-privacy-mechanism. The seal is the whole product · if it could be bypassed, the verdict would not be honest.
The sixth stage is the unseal. At the prompt time you set on composition, on the final day of the duration you chose, the verdict publishes for both participants at the same instant. Each of you receives an email (via Brevo) with a one-click sign-in link. The envelope opens; your partner's record-slip appears next to yours. Whether you agree or disagree is now visible · but it is the smallest part of what arrives.
The seventh stage is the written verdict. On every paid decision the verdict ships with a five-layer analysis: the agreement rate across the period; each partner's conviction trajectory; the themes extracted from your notes with frequencies per partner; a 600-to-1200-word synthesis paragraph written by Claude that names the underlying axis of your disagreement; and one specific question for the conversation that follows. On the free first Solo decision, the verdict ships with a Python summary analysis only · trajectory, trend, stability, sentiment, top themes, and decision-readiness · without the Claude-written synthesis. The synthesis is the part of the verdict that costs us real money to produce; we tier it behind the paywall so the free decision can stay free. A walked-through real verdict lives at A real verdict.