Charter pricing is not a launch promotion. It is not a discount applied to a standard rate that will be restored once the studio is full. It is a permanent pricing structure for the first cohort of members, set below the rate that will apply to all subsequent cohorts, and guaranteed to remain stable for the lifetime of that membership. Understanding why requires a brief explanation of what the charter cohort actually is to us.
The data problem
A skin science practice that tracks longitudinal data is worth more as it ages. The first twelve months of operation produce limited predictive value, we can measure individual sessions but not trajectories. By month twenty-four, we have cohort-level data on how different skin types respond to different treatment sequences across two full annual cycles. By month thirty-six, we can model a new member's expected eighteen-month trajectory on the basis of their initial profile, because we have dozens of comparable profiles with known outcomes.
The charter members are the source of that data. Not their personal information, data is anonymised at the cohort level and members own their individual records, but the aggregate pattern. The first fifty members make the practice clinically more valuable to every member who joins after them. Charter pricing is, in part, an acknowledgement of that contribution.
The charter cohort is not an early-adopter discount. It is a founding membership in the clinical dataset that makes BASE worth joining.
The math
Charter Maison membership is priced at the current Atelier rate. The Atelier rate is not expected to hold, as the studio reaches capacity and the waitlist grows, pricing will be reviewed upward to reflect demonstrated demand and the increasing value of the longitudinal data layer. Charter members are not subject to those reviews. The rate is fixed at the point of joining and does not increase for as long as the membership is active.
The cap is five hundred charter memberships across all tiers. This is not a round number chosen for marketing, it is the minimum viable cohort size for the predictive modelling to become meaningful. At five hundred members with quarterly sessions, we accumulate approximately two thousand session data points per year. That is enough. More members before the data infrastructure is operating would produce noise faster than signal.
What the covenant means
We use the word covenant deliberately. A covenant is a mutual commitment with specific terms. Ours: we hold your price for the lifetime of the membership, regardless of what the rate becomes for new members. Yours: you commit to the cadence and engage with the longitudinal tracking that is the foundation of the practice. A charter member who uses BASE as a drop-in booking service rather than a residency is getting less value than the rate implies, and is giving us less value than the rate reflects. The covenant works when both sides are engaged with the long-term.
