FAQ
What is this, exactly?
PlanSmith sells planners for AI coding agents. Here is what that actually means, in concrete terms.
What it is
- What am I actually buying?
- A folder of Markdown files. The School Management planner is 72 of them — an entry point (
START-HERE.md), a machine-readable feature map, a contract for each major feature and screen, a build sequence, and a complete worked example. You download a zip and put the folder in your project. - Is it software I have to install?
- No. There is nothing to install and nothing to run. It is text your coding agent reads. That also means you can read every word of it yourself before you point an agent at it.
- So it’s a prompt?
- No. A prompt is a paragraph you paste. A planner is a structured package your agent walks through: 83 cited feature anchors for School Management, grouped into 15 stages, each carrying what to ask, what counts as done, and which real products the requirement came from. The point is the inventory behind it, not the file format.
- Does it write my app for me?
- It drives your coding agent to build it. The planner interviews you, works out exactly what the app needs, and writes the spec — then your agent writes the code from that spec, one feature at a time, with a definition of “finished” to check itself against. You end up with a working app. What the planner adds is that your agent stops inventing the requirements along the way.
Using it
- How do I actually use it?
- Put the folder in your project and tell your agent:
Read START-HERE.md and act as the planner.It asks what you are building, walks the checklist with you, and writes the spec toCLAUDE.mdorAGENTS.md. Then you tell your agent to build. - Which coding agents does it work with?
- Any agent that can read files in your repository — Claude Code, Cursor, and ChatGPT Codex are what we test against. There is no SDK and no integration to wire up, because it is only Markdown.
- Do I need to know the domain?
- No — that is the whole point. You do not need to know what a school registrar needs, or how a restaurant handles recipe depletion. The checklist already carries what shipping products in that market actually do, and the planner asks you to include, defer, or skip each one.
- Do I need to be a developer?
- You need to be comfortable running an AI coding agent against a codebase. You do not need to write the code yourself, but this is a tool for building software, not a no-code product.
The evidence
- What does “cited” mean?
- Every recommendation traces to a count from real, in-market products. The School Management inventory was built from 46 school systems, and the planner records how many of them had each feature — an admin portal in 38, a gradebook in 38, a teacher portal in 35. Your agent works from a frequency table rather than from what it imagines a product in that market contains.
- Who did the counting?
- People, by hand, from products shipping today. No model generated these numbers. That is slow and it is the reason the catalogue grows one market at a time.
- Is every planner backed by a counted inventory?
- Not yet, and we say so on the planner itself. Anything without a verified ledger is flagged in red on its page rather than quietly presented as if it had one. Check the catalogue — each planner shows its source count, or an explicit unverified flag.
- How do I know the planners actually produce working software?
- We hand the same planner to several models, let each one build, then audit what actually shipped and publish the scores — including the bad ones. The build-offs are public, and several of the resulting apps are live and clickable.
Buying
- How much, and is it a subscription?
- $49 per planner, once. Not a subscription. You get the planner and every future version of it.
- What happens after I pay?
- The planner appears in your library and you download it there. Checkout is locked to the email you signed in with, so the purchase always lands on your account — you can re-download any time.
- What do updates mean?
- The inventories grow as more products are counted, and the planners are revised as we learn what makes agents fail. When a planner you own is updated, the new version is in your library — no extra charge, no new purchase.
- Can I get a refund?
- No — the whole planner downloads the moment you pay, so there is nothing to return. That puts the burden on us to let you judge it first, so we do: every planner page lists the inventory it was built from and how many products were counted, the build-offs show what real coding models produced from it, and several of those apps are live and clickable before you spend anything. If a download fails or you bought the wrong planner, that isn't a refund question — email hello@plansmith.io and we'll sort it. Where local consumer law gives you a right we can't sign away, it still applies.
Still unsure whether a planner fits what you’re building? Open one and read its full description — every planner page shows the inventory it was built from before you buy.
Browse the 11 planners →