Underwriting · V-track · 31 July 2026
Eligibility Check for NIH Grant Mechanisms
Researchers and grant administrators preparing NIH applications cannot quickly tell whether their proposal satisfies the eligibility and clinical-trial-gate rules for the specific mechanism they're applying under (R01, R21, R03, T32, R25, R36, RC2, etc.), each with overlapping but distinct templated requirements. Today this means manually cross-referencing NIH's published mechanism guidance by hand for every submissi…
15
± 3.1
WATCH
REWORK
PROVE
BUILD
rubric w3.0-20260804 · interval ±3.1 at 95% (n=10, sd=1.6, measured 2026-08-04)
Stages run293
Cost to produce$0.00
Wall clock69 min
Confidence71/100
What an analysis cost to produce belongs beside it. A reader deciding whether to trust a verdict is entitled to know whether it came from twenty-six stages or one, and nothing else in this category will tell them.
every charge, every rebuttal, every ruling
The case against it
| Charge | Rebuttal | Ruling |
|---|---|---|
| No viable distribution channel exists at any price | CONCEDED — Conceded. The channels record itself shows every path is either cash-cost-zero-but-dead (SEO against grants.nih.gov and ConductScience), structurally | upheld — Conceded and independently supported: SEO is owned by grants.nih.gov plus a free clone, the NIH Guide list is structurally closed, admin listservs are anti-vendor, and OSP procurement costs |
| NIH's own official tool already gives away the exact same determination for free | CONCEDED — Conceded. The competitor listing confirms an authoritative, free, government-branded tool with exact overlap on the clinical-trial-gate use case, whic | upheld — The clinical-trial gate — the highest-stakes half of the promise — is public infrastructure published by the funder itself, which is also the authority of record on the answer. |
| A free bootstrapped clone (ConductScience) has already shipped the same product | CONCEDED — Conceded. Two ConductScience tools with exact overlap on mechanism-fit and S10 eligibility are already live and free, launched the same year this cand | partial — Upheld on overlap and price collapse; discounted slightly because ConductScience's tools are lead-gen for an equipment company and shallow, so the 'no first-mover window' framing overstates |
| Trivial replication by any competent developer with an API key | CONCEDED — Conceded. The record states the moat is none and the rule set is public policy text, meaning any traction is copiable at zero marginal cost. | upheld — Data moat is explicitly none; the input is public prose and the output is boolean questionnaire logic, replicable in a weekend by anyone who sees traction. |
| The buyer already has an institutional gatekeeper absorbing this exact task | CONCEDED — Conceded. The channels record independently confirms Offices of Sponsored Programs are a real buyer with budget for this exact function, contradicting | upheld — OSP pre-submission review is standard at R1s and mid-tier institutions, which falsifies the thesis's core 'no gatekeeper' premise for exactly the segment with a budget line. |
| Unbounded human maintenance burden with no automation ceiling, for a solo operator | CONCEDED — Conceded. No evidence in the record describes an automated ingestion pipeline for NIH rule changes; data_moat and incumbent_weakness both frame the ru | partial — Upheld that rule re-encoding is permanent manual labor with no removable-human path; discounted because diff-alert cron plus periodic re-read is a few hours a month at this scale, not litera |
| Liability exposure is asymmetric and uninsured against near-zero revenue | CONCEDED — Conceded. Nothing in the record — no pricing, legal, or disclaimer infrastructure is described — rebuts this. The record only establishes price collap | partial — Reputational risk in a small networked field is real, but 'liability' is overstated — a disclaimered advisory tool carries near-zero legal exposure and this is an ordinary risk being stacked |
| Buyer population is overstated by counting applications, not distinct informed buyers | CONCEDED — Conceded. The buyer_population field itself flags this as an applications-count proxy, not a unique-buyer count, and rates confidence as merely 'infer | upheld — 52,000 is applications, self-flagged as inferred; repeat PIs know their mechanism's rules and the genuinely confused first-timer subset is small and has no discretionary budget. |
| FOA-level idiosyncrasy makes the core promise structurally incomplete | CONCEDED — Conceded. The incumbent_weakness note describes only fragmentation across existing tools, with no claim that a mechanism-level rule engine can capture | upheld — Mechanism-level rules are routinely amended by institute-specific FOAs and guide notices, so a mechanism-level engine cannot deliver a trustworthy pass/fail — it delivers a hint the user mus |
A separate agent argued against this idea, a second answered, a third ruled. 9 of 9 charges were conceded rather than defended. Published in full because a score with the objections removed is a advertisement, and because the objections are usually more useful than the verdict.
dimension by dimension
How it scored
| Dimension | Score | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| D1 | 22 | Real annoyance three times a year for a subset of first-time applicants, but the pain is minutes of reading and is already absorbed by OSP staff whose job it is. |
| D2 | 8 | Zero evidence of anyone paying for standalone eligibility checking; every exact-overlap product in the market is priced at $0, including the funder's own. |
| D3 | 5 | All five channels are dead: SEO owned by a .gov, the highest-intent list structurally closed to vendors, listservs anti-vendor, OSP procurement priced at $3-8k unpaid tim |
| D4 | 8 | Rubric floor — public NIH policy prose plus questionnaire logic, no accumulating dataset, no hard join, no switching cost; data_moat conceded as none. |
| D5 | 58 | Cheap to build in a weekend, but permanent unremovable human re-encoding on every NIH rule change and a $10k cash-to-first-dollar with capital_blocked true. |
| D6 | 8 | Bursty three-times-a-year usage with 30%/mo churn and a $0 price ceiling — no subscription logic and no per-seat expansion path. |
| D7 | 6 | Even at implausible full penetration of confused first-time applicants at a price nobody charges, this is a few thousand dollars a year; no adjacent expansion because por |
| D8 | 30 | Technically trivial for this operator, but the required asset is credibility inside research administration and a sales motion into university procurement — neither of wh |
named, priced, and dated
Who already does this
| Competitor | Pricing | Funding | Launched | Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NIH Clinical Trial Decision Tool ("Determine Now!") | free | n/a (official NIH government tool) | pre-2018 (tied to 2017 cli | exact |
| ConductScience Free NIH Funding Mechanism Recommender | free | bootstrapped (ConductScience, equipment compan | 2026 (per page metadata) | exact |
| ConductScience S10 Eligibility Finder | free | bootstrapped (ConductScience) | 2026 | exact |
| GrantCopilot.ai | $24/month ($18/mo annual) | unknown, appears bootstrapped SaaS | active 2026 | partial |
| GotGrant.com NIH Grant Explorer | free (grant search); paid tiers unclear | unknown | 2026 | partial |
| Grantsights.com | unclear, appears free content/tool hybrid | unknown | 2026 | partial |
| UKRI per-council eligibility checkers (e.g. EPSRC/STFC 'Check if you're eligible') | free (built into funder's own site) | government body, not a startup | long-standing, continuousl | adjacent |
Where the buyers actually are
| Channel | Why it reaches them |
|---|---|
| RESADM-L / NCURA listserv | |
| Google: 'R21 eligibility checker' / 'NIH R01 eligibility' | |
| r/AskAcademia, #AcademicTwitter/#ECRchat | |
| University Office of Sponsored Programs (direct outreach) | |
| NIH Guide/eRA Commons listserv |
what stands in the way
Regulatory gates
| Gate | Finding |
|---|---|
| G1 | No concrete legal violation identified. The product reads and applies publicly available NIH guidance; it does not access NIH systems, submit applications, or impersonate institutional autho |
| G2 | Core loop is fully autonomous: user selects mechanism, answers templated questions, receives deterministic pass/fail against published rules. No per-customer service, sales calls, physical w |
| G3 | Grant administration software and compliance tools are a paid market. Institutions, research offices, and grant consultants pay for eligibility screening, compliance validation, and administ |
| G4 | Thin first version is buildable in 30 days: parse NIH's published mechanism PDFs into structured eligibility rules (R01, R21, R03 gates), build a Flask form with mechanism selector and quest |
| G5 | Multiple reachable channels exist: research administrators and grant offices (searchable via university directories, professional associations like NAGAP), NIH-funded institutions (public li |
written before the outcome is known
The pre-registered test
| Term | Value |
|---|---|
| days | 21 |
| offer | A single-screen unified NIH pass/fail: pick a mechanism (R01/R21/R03/T32/R25/R36), answer 8 questions, get mechanism eligibility plus clinical-trial gate plus the specific FOA-override warnings in one result — offered as |
| price | 49 |
| metric | Count of distinct institutions that pay $49 via Stripe for a single submission audit (not replies, not demo requests, not 'send me pricing'). |
| channel | Direct cold email to 60 named Office of Sponsored Programs pre-award staff at R1 and R2 institutions (public directory scrape), with a screenshot of a real completed determination and an explicit note that NIH's own tool |
| threshold | 3 paid audits from 3 distinct institutions out of 60 emails; 0-1 is a confirmed kill and 2 is still a kill because it cannot survive the $0 price floor. |
Recorded at the moment the verdict was issued and not editable afterwards. If this is launched, the result lands on the ledger whether it passes or fails.
and what moves it forward
Where this idea is
| Phase now | Analysed — Underwritten, with the argument against it on the record. |
| What you do here | Read the case against it first. An upheld charge you cannot answer is the verdict, whatever the score says. |
| To leave this phase | You have read the upheld charges and decided the idea survives them. |
| Gate status | This gate is a judgement, not a query. The system will not rule on it and will not pretend to — you decide, and the reason is recorded. |
| Next phase | Validating — A pre-registered test is live and running. |
This gate is a judgement rather than a query, so the system states it and refuses to rule on it. Pretending software can decide whether a business "can take money from somebody who is not you" would make every gate on this site meaningless. Advancing an idea needs its link — the one handed back when it was submitted. Founder-owned ideas are advanced from the console. See the whole pipeline.
| What to do in this phase | What it proves | From which part of the analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Answer the upheld charge: No viable distribution channel exists at any price | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the upheld charge: NIH's own official tool already gives away the exact same determination for free | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the partial charge: A free bootstrapped clone (ConductScience) has already shipped the same product | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the upheld charge: Trivial replication by any competent developer with an API key | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the upheld charge: The buyer already has an institutional gatekeeper absorbing this exact task | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the partial charge: Unbounded human maintenance burden with no automation ceiling, for a solo operator | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the partial charge: Liability exposure is asymmetric and uninsured against near-zero revenue | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the upheld charge: Buyer population is overstated by counting applications, not distinct informed buyers | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
| Answer the upheld charge: FOA-level idiosyncrasy makes the core promise structurally incomplete | The verdict survives its strongest objection, or it does not and you have learned that before spending. | arbitration |
Every step traces to a field this idea's own underwriting produced — not generic best practice, which is free everywhere. 0 of 9 complete. Mark them off in the console.
and what did not complete
How this was produced
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Wall clock | 69 minutes |
A verdict produced by 22 of 23 stages is not the same artefact as one produced by all of them, and which stages failed was recorded on every run and shown nowhere until now. If a stage that feeds a section died, the section came from somewhere else or nowhere — and you are entitled to know which is in front of you before you act on it.
The money
| price point | anchor: GrantCopilot.ai charges $24/month ($18/mo annual) but bundles AI proposal writing, grant discovery, and templates — eligibility checking is a minor feature inside a much larger paid product, not a standalone SKU; monthly: 0; rationale: No standalone eligibility checker in the market charges money because NIH itself gives the core function away for free. Any defensible price has to attach eligibility-checking to something NIH doesn't provide (e.g., document assembly, deadline tracking, multi-mechanism comparison) — as a bare pass/fail tool, price point is effectively $0. |
| current spend | amount: $0; source: Candidate's own competitor list: NIH 'Determine Now!' tool is free and government-run; ConductScience tools are free and bootstrapped, both marked 'exact' overlap; on what: NIH's own free official clinical-trial/mechanism decision tool, plus at least two free bootstrapped competitor tools (ConductScience mechanism recommender and S10 eligibility finder) that already do this exact check |
| funding route | presale |
| revenue model | subscription |
| churn monthly pct | why: Demand is bursty, not habitual: R01 applications cycle three times a year on fixed dates, per NIH's own posted schedule ('New R01 applications are accepted three times a year: 5 February, 5 June, and 5 October'). A user runs the check once per submission attempt, then has no reason to keep paying between cycles, so a monthly subscription model would bleed users every month outside a deadline window.; value: 30 |
| cash to first dollar | 10000 |
| marginal cost per unit | value: 0.02; components: Static rules/decision-tree engine (if/else logic against published mechanism tables) run on existing VPS/Flask stack: negligible compute, no per-call API cost. If mechanism rules are parsed or explained via an LLM call instead of hardcoded logic, cost rises to roughly $0.01-0.05 per check for API tokens; otherwise cost is near-zero (server time only). |
What it costs to start
| capital blocked | True |
What has to be built
| data moat | none — the underlying eligibility rules are public NIH policy text, NIH itself already publishes a free official determination tool covering the exact same clinical-trial-gate use case, and a free bootstrapped competitor (ConductScience) already ships a mechanism recommender. Nothing a user does here (answering a questionnaire) generates data a competitor can't get by reading the same public FOAs. |
| components | Mechanism rules engine (R01, R21, R03, T32, R25, R36, RC2 eligibility + clinical-trial-gat: risk: high; units: 6; Questionnaire UI flow (mechanism select + project/applicant questions): risk: low; units: 2; Pass/fail determination + results display: risk: low; units: 1; NIH guide-notice scraper and change-diff monitor: risk: med; units: 3; Admin review workflow for re-encoding rules after policy changes: risk: med; units: 2; Basic auth/account layer: risk: low; units: 1; Deployment/hosting on existing stack: risk: low; units: 1 |
| total units | 16 |
| hardest unknown | NIH mechanism eligibility and clinical-trial-gate rules live as prose in FOAs and guide notices, not structured data, with institute-specific exceptions and periodic edits. There's no reliable way to encode this as deterministic logic without a human re-reading policy text every time it changes, and a misencoded rule produces a false pass/fail with real consequences for someone's grant submission — that's a liability surface, not just a bug. |
the verdict is not the end of the process
If you decide to do this
| Step | What it means | Where it happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Read the case against it first | Charges the arbiter upheld are the ones to answer before committing. If an upheld charge is fatal for you, the verdict is not. | on this page |
| 2 · Commit the pre-registered test | The test is already written: Count of distinct institutions that pay $49 via Stripe for a single submission audit (not replies, not demo requests, not 'send me pricing'). at 3 paid audits from 3 distinct institutions out of 60 emails; 0-1 is a confirmed kill and 2 is still a kill because it cannot survive the $0 price floor.. Committing freezes it with a date, and it cannot be edited afterwards. | promote it → |
| 3 · Stand up the offer | A landing page, a price, and an instrumented link. Nothing is proven until somebody who does not know you is asked to pay. | ventures → |
| 4 · Run distribution and let it resolve | The test resolves mechanically on its deadline: actual against threshold, no judgement. A test never distributed resolves VOID rather than FAIL — inaction is not evidence. | automatic, daily |
| 5 · The outcome grades this verdict | Whatever happens is written back against this prediction and scored. That is what makes the next verdict better, and it is the only honest basis for ever claiming an accuracy. | the ledger → |
Not now. Something specific would have to change first, and it is named in the ruling. Steps 2 and 3 open the operator console, which lives under this same domain at /account and requires a log-in — the public record is readable by anyone, and committing a prediction against it is not. Step 5 happens automatically: this prediction is already frozen with its score, its confidence, and every dimension as it stood, waiting for an outcome to grade it against.