Design memo: why the demo is free, full, and login-less
Design memos document real decisions in Wiz Kids and the research behind them.
Wiz Kids has a demo anyone can open and play — real lessons from real realms, no account, no email gate, no expiring trial. Progress lives only in the browser tab's session storage: close it and it's gone. Every part of that sentence was a decision, and this memo records why — because the default in edtech is the opposite (demo video, sales call, pilot paperwork), and departing from a default deserves reasons on paper.
The procurement argument
Our own vendor-evaluation guidance tells schools: don't accept claims, verify them. A teacher deciding whether Wiz Kids teaches what this library says it teaches shouldn't have to take our word through a sales funnel — the product is the evidence, and a login-less demo is that evidence made inspectable in a free period, before any consent paperwork, budget line, or meeting. Teachers evaluate curriculum by teaching themselves a lesson from it; we'd rather be judged that way than by our marketing, and a vendor whose demo requires a meeting is telling you something about which artifact they trust.
The consistency argument
An email-gated demo would be a strange front door for a zero-PII product: "we collect nothing about children — your email address, please." The demo is the architecture's public face: open devtools while playing it (we tell evaluators to do exactly that) and watch nothing personal leave. And session-only progress isn't a limitation we tolerate but the correct design: a demo that remembered you would need an identifier, and the whole point is not having one. The demo is the product's privacy claim, running.
The honest ledger
- No lead capture. The standard demo exists to harvest emails for a sales sequence. We gave that up — mostly a cost on paper, since the zero-PII decision already forbade the email-list business; the demo just makes the abstention visible.
- Scrapers get a look too. A login-less demo exposes real curriculum content to people ripping it rather than evaluating it. We weighed this seriously (it's the genuine cost): our answer so far is legal posture (terms, copyright, no ML-training license) plus the fact that our defensible value is the system — the mastery engine, spaced reviews, validated task engines — not any single lesson's text. A demo-subset bundle (full catalog only behind class provisioning) remains an open option if abuse forces it; if we take it, this memo gets updated, not quietly.
- Demo ≠ product. Session-storage progress means no spaced-repetition schedule, no mastery arc across weeks — the demo shows lessons, not the system that makes them stick. We accept being under-sold by our own demo; the alternative (fake persistence with real identifiers) sells the system by betraying its principles.
The line we drew
Free demo, yes; freemium product, no. The demo is an evaluation instrument, not a tier — there's no upgrade nag inside it, no artificial wall placed mid-lesson to force conversion (the dark-pattern line applies to selling as much as to playing). Classrooms run on the real thing, provisioned by teachers; the demo's job is to let every stakeholder — teacher, principal, parent, skeptical forum commenter — see exactly what children would be doing, at the cost of one URL.
References
- Messick, S. (1995). Validity of psychological assessment. American Psychologist, 50(9) — evaluate the construct directly; the procurement argument is validity theory applied to buying.
- The reading-privacy-policies checklist — the standard this demo is designed to be checked against, devtools open.
© Glu IO Pty. Ltd. — Wiz Kids (wiz.kids). Link freely; republication requires permission — see terms. Found an error in our reading of the research? We correct fast: tell any teacher piloting Wiz Kids.