Paid UX Ownership And Companion Sync Update

Since the last update, the platform has moved beyond simple UX browsing and deeper into the rules that will eventually make paid creator UX viable.

This round was less about adding a brand-new surface and more about tightening the system underneath it. Pricing metadata now exists in Face Studio, the website can show structured pricing instead of treating everything like a free download, and paid UX ownership behaves much more like a real account-backed library instead of a loose file handoff.

That matters because the hard part of paid UX is not putting a price next to a face. The hard part is making sure ownership, sync, delisting, and cross-device behavior all stay coherent once money and creator rights enter the system.

Face Studio Can Now Carry Creator Pricing Metadata

One of the important foundational steps in this stretch was adding structured pricing metadata to Face Studio projects.

That means creator UX can now carry price information as part of the project-level publishing data rather than relying on ad hoc website-only fields later. The pricing model is intentionally structured:

• price in cents
• explicit currency
• free versus paid handled by data, not display text

That gives the rest of the platform a clean foundation. It means the backend and website can reason about a UX item as free, paid, or not yet priced without relying on brittle string parsing or hand-maintained labels.

The Website Now Understands Paid UX Better

The website UX Store also took a real step forward.

Instead of treating every creator item like a free download candidate, the store now renders structured pricing and uses clearer ownership-aware states. That means paid UX can show up as paid, creator-owned UX can stop looking like a purchase prompt for its own author, and the store is no longer pretending that every priced item is immediately downloadable in the same way as a free one.

That change sounds obvious in hindsight, but it is a meaningful product boundary. A mixed store with free and paid UX has to represent those states honestly or it becomes confusing very quickly.

Ownership Retention Now Behaves More Like A Real Library

Another major step in this round was tightening what it means to actually own a UX item.

The website now persists library membership correctly when a paid or creator-owned UX item is downloaded through the signed-in account flow. That matters because library membership is what makes later restore and sync behavior possible.

The cloud side also now preserves access for users who already acquired a UX item even after that item is removed from the public store. In practice, that means a delisted face can disappear from the storefront without disappearing from the account-backed library of a user who already had access to it.

That is a subtle but important rule. A marketplace cannot behave like a simple public file listing forever. Once ownership exists, removal from the store and removal from a user's library are not the same action.

The Account Story Is More Consistent Across Surfaces

This stretch also exposed and fixed a deeper identity problem.

In some cases, a single person could end up with more than one backend account underneath the same apparent sign-in identity, especially when mixing older email/password use with later Apple sign-in. That created bad downstream behavior because ownership, creator state, and library access are all tied to the underlying account identifier, not just the visible email address.

The account-linking path is now in a healthier state, and duplicate-user migration tooling was added so those cases can be cleaned up instead of worked around. That matters because paid UX and creator ownership become unreliable very quickly if the same human can accidentally fragment their identity across multiple backend users.

Companion Sync Is Benefiting From The Same Ownership Work

Companion also benefited from this round even though the biggest visible changes started on the website and in cloud infrastructure.

The shared library path now does a better job of preserving creator-owned and previously acquired paid UX in the account-backed library, including after delisting. Once that data path was corrected, Companion could pull the same retained library state through cloud sync instead of behaving like those items had vanished.

That is the broader pattern in this stage of Apex Infinity development: once account identity and ownership are treated seriously in one surface, the other surfaces benefit too.

What Still Comes Next

This is not the finished paid UX story yet.

There is still no final purchase flow, no final checkout path, and no final legal or marketplace language on the public site. Pricing is now part of the platform model, but commerce itself is still in a scaffolding phase.

That is intentional. The goal in this round was to make sure the platform can represent paid UX correctly before pretending the full buying experience is done.

Where This Leaves The Platform

The platform is now in a stronger position than it was even a day ago.

Creator pricing metadata exists. The website can represent paid UX more honestly. Ownership is behaving more like ownership. Delisted UX can still remain with the users who already acquired it. And Companion is benefiting from the same account-backed library model instead of standing apart from it.

That is the right order of operations.

Before Apex Infinity can fully sell creator UX, it has to be trustworthy about what happens after a UX item is priced, acquired, synced, removed from sale, and restored later. This round was about making that trust model more real.