From the Forge: Per-Item Purchases, Search, and Campaign Upgrades

Rob here.

I’m starting a new series called From the Forge for product and development updates from Guardian Foundry. Part of this is to keep users in the loop. Part of it is that I think it’s useful to show how we actually build: what we ship, what we fix, what turns out to be harder than it looked, and where the product is heading.

April has been a big month for us. We rebranded our former training platform as Guardian Foundry and rebuilt a lot underneath it. There’s a long list of things I could talk about, but I want to start with the biggest one.

Per-Item Access

Until now, subscriptions handled most of the platform’s access control.

That worked early on, but it was too rigid for where the product needed to go. Not everyone wants the same relationship with training. Some people want to explore for free. Some want a solo path and the option to buy specific content when it’s relevant. Some want the full Guild experience with instructor feedback and community access. And soon we’ll have enterprise teams that need a different distribution model entirely.

So I built the entitlement system the platform actually needed.

Quests, trials, and campaigns can now be sold individually, granted manually, or distributed by voucher code, independent of subscription tier. That gives us a much more flexible way to match access to the learner instead of forcing every learner into the same model.

That matters for a few reasons.

First, it gives us a real standalone commerce layer. We’re no longer limited to “subscribe or leave.” We can package and sell individual learning experiences in a way that actually makes sense.

Second, it makes institutional and cohort distribution much cleaner. If we want to grant access directly, issue codes, or support partner-driven distribution later, the platform can do that now.

Third, and this is the part I care about most, it gives us flexibility without pushing us into nickel-and-dime product design. I do not want Guardian Foundry to feel like a maze of upsells. I want it to be clear what you get, why you get it, and how to go deeper if you want to.

That’s the line I’m trying to hold.

One Search Bar Across the Platform

We also shipped universal content search in the dashboard header.

Now you can search once and get grouped results across trainings, quests, trials, campaigns, and Hall of Records videos. This is one of those features that sounds obvious in hindsight, which usually means it should have existed sooner.

What matters is not just that search is faster. It’s that the platform makes more sense. Users should not have to understand our internal content model before they can find what they need.

Campaigns Got Better

One of the core ideas behind Guardian Foundry is that training should feel guided, not just dumped in a pile.

That’s why we built Campaigns as a higher-level structure over trainings, quests, and trials. A campaign lets us assemble a real path through material, whether that’s for a SOC analyst, a detection engineer, or another role we
want to support well. That matters because abundance is not the same thing as clarity. A giant library is only useful if people know where to start and what to do next.

This week we also improved the authoring side of that model. Quests can now embed trial gates directly inside step flows, and quest steps can be reordered inline. That may sound like a small admin improvement, but it closes
a real workflow gap for the people building structured learning paths in the platform.

We Also Tightened the Back Office

A lot of the recent work has been about making the operational side of the product less clunky.

We split the large tabbed admin dashboard into dedicated routes, which makes it faster and easier to work in. We cleaned up support workflows, improved availability and SLA signaling, fixed filtering issues, and added better
score and XP adjustment tools for staff.

That kind of work is not glamorous, but it matters. If the internal tools are slow or awkward, the product degrades from the inside out.

Also Shipped

There were also a lot of smaller fixes and quality-of-life improvements across the platform.

Some were straightforward. Some were annoying. One of the more painful bugs was a viewport issue that could cause an in-progress report form to disappear when the browser layout changed. That’s fixed now. We also cleaned up a
number of auth, email, support, and UX edge cases that had been lingering.

Since GA on April 7, 2026, we’ve shipped a lot in a short window. That’s intentional.

I’d rather ship, learn, and tighten than disappear for months trying to produce a fake version of perfect. That does mean some things land a little rough and get refined in public. I’m fine with that tradeoff as long as the product keeps getting better and the direction stays coherent.

That’s where things stand right now.

More soon from the forge.

Rob Noeth
Founder, Level Effect