Roadmap: what shipped in Q1 2026, and what’s next

This is the first of what we're going to make a quarterly habit: a public roadmap recap. The goal is to be honest about what we shipped, what we deprecated, and what we're working on next — in detail specific enough that a creator can plan around it.

Shipped in Q1 2026

1:1 booking lifecycle, end to end

The biggest single piece of work this quarter. Q4 2025 shipped the booking and the payment flow. Q1 2026 shipped the parts that make the money actually settle: end-of-call disposition, wallet holds for creator-pays bookings, the reconciliation sweeper, and the 48-hour hold expiry as a safety net. If you ran a 1:1 session after March 2026 and the money landed without you having to write to support, the unsung infrastructure of this quarter is the reason.

Marketplace v2

We'd been running on a sidebar-style marketplace UI for most of 2025; it didn't scale past about 200 creators on the page. The v2 marketplace shipped behind a `?v2=1` flag in late March and went default-on in early May. Cleaner grid, AI-assisted search, quick- filter chips, infinite scroll, language and category facets, plus a new ?kind= deep-link param so anywhere on the site can link to a pre-filtered slice (live / book / group).

Hourly live-streaming sessions

Until February you could only ticket a fixed-duration live event. Now you can run an open-ended hourly session — viewers join, pay by the hour, and we settle when they leave. The use case we built this for was open Q&A office hours; the actual usage so far is broader. Hourly group sessions are also live.

The Avatok wallet, unified

Earnings from live events, 1:1 sessions, group sessions, and live tipping all used to live in slightly different ledgers. As of Q1 they all land in a single wallet with a unified transaction log, exportable as CSV, and pay out on a single Stripe schedule.

Email reminders that don't miss

We migrated all time-anchored email reminders (booking 24h/30min, partner renewal cadence) to Brevo's scheduledAt + batchId contract. The previous system used internal cron polling and occasionally missed reminders when the worker took its sweet time. The new system has been delivering at 100% measured rate for two months. Boring infrastructure, worth highlighting.

Deprecated in Q1 2026

• The legacy AI-credit system. Avatok used to gate AI features behind a separate credit balance. That separate balance was confusing, especially for creators who also had a wallet balance, and the credit system was generating more support tickets than it generated revenue. Gone.
• Custom JWT session handling. All session state now goes through Clerk + Supabase Auth bridging. The migration was unglamorous but eliminated a class of session-refresh bugs that had been chronic.
• Standalone voice-bot product surface. Voice agents are still active behind the scenes for specific creator flows, but as a marketed product they're paused. We'd rather make the three primary surfaces excellent than spread attention.

What's next: Q2 2026

Four big bets. None of them is guaranteed to ship in the quarter, but they're what we're working on, and we'll publish a Q2 recap in late July with the actual outcome.

Bet 1: a real creator analytics layer

Today the creator dashboard shows you what you've earned. It does not show you what you could be earning. Q2 ships a real analytics layer with cohort retention, conversion funnels for listings, and weekly summary emails. The goal: a creator should be able to look at the dashboard once a week and know what to change.

Bet 2: scheduled live-event series

Right now every live event is a one-off. Q2 introduces recurring series with single-checkout multi-event passes, automatic calendar invites, and per-event recordings made available to series ticket holders. The use case is exactly what the name suggests: weekly classes, monthly workshops, eight-week cohorts.

Bet 3: international payouts for more regions

We support 45+ countries today via Stripe Connect. Several commonly-requested regions are not yet on the list. Q2 adds at least three more — the work here is mostly local-bank-rail configuration plus the tax-form coverage for each country. We'll publish the list when we know.

Bet 4: a self-serve dispute flow

Right now if a booking settles in a way one side disputes, the path is email support@avatok.aiand a human looks at the lifecycle log. That works at our current scale, but it's slow and the rules are opaque to the parties. Q2 ships a self-serve dispute flow with the rules published in the help center and the outcomes machine-decidable for the common cases. The edge cases will still come to a human, but the common cases shouldn't need to.

What we're explicitly not doing

• Display advertising. Avatok products are ad- free and will remain so. No retargeting pixels, no third-party ad networks, no sponsored slots in the marketplace.
• A native mobile app for creators. The web app works on mobile and we're happy with that trade-off for the foreseeable future. Mobile-optimized web pays for itself faster than native code we'd ship in two stores.
• Crypto payouts. We were asked. The answer is no. The volatility, KYC complexity, and lack of consumer protection aren't a fit for paying creators reliably.

That's the quarter. If you want to weigh in on any of the bets — what the analytics layer should expose, what countries we should prioritize, what the dispute flow should default to — write to support@avatok.ai. We read everything and we've changed direction on proposals before based on what creators told us.