Support

Alloy help

• When something is broken — audio won't play, progress not saving, credits or access check failed, diagnostic won't startAlloy

  When something is broken

  Alloy is built so that a failed read costs you nothing. Most of the messages that look alarming are the app telling you honestly that a *read* failed — not that your work, your credits or your place in a course have gone anywhere.

  The single most useful thing you can send us is the exact wording on your screen. Alloy's messages are deliberately different from one another: one of them means "we could not check", another means "you do not have enough", and a third means "the content is not ready". They have different answers, and the words on the screen are what tell them apart.

  "My progress isn't saving"

  Almost always this is a failed read, not lost work. When Alloy cannot read your progress it says so in those words on the Progress page: *"We could not read your progress just now. This is not a statement that you have not studied — it means the read failed. Nothing has been lost; try again shortly."*

  So: your studying has not been deleted, and you have not been reset. Please reload the page or come back in a few minutes. If you still see that message after a while, tell us and we will take it from there — send the wording, the course you were in, and roughly when it started.

  We will never tell you your progress has been lost on the strength of that message, because the message does not say that.

  "It says it couldn't check my access" or "my credits weren't applied"

  This is a refusal to *start*, not a charge. When Alloy cannot read your credit balance it stops before doing anything and says: *"Your credit balance could not be read just now, so we can't tell whether this is unlocked for you. This is a problem on our side — it is not a statement that your balance is zero or that your plan lapsed."* The panel is headed **"We couldn't check your access"** — that heading is the tell.

  The same design runs on the server: an unreadable balance is a refusal that explicitly reports *"nothing was served and nothing was charged"*, and it is deliberately kept separate from a credit shortfall so a failed read can never turn into a charge. On a practice drill you get the matching message: *"We could not read your credit balance, so we will not start a drill that spends credits. This is not a statement about your balance — please try again shortly."*

  What that means for you:

  • Nothing was spent. The activity did not start, so there was nothing to charge for. • It says nothing about your balance. It is not a claim that you are at zero, that your plan lapsed, or that your account is restricted in any way. • Try again shortly. These are transient by design.

  If it keeps happening, send us the exact wording, the course, and the page you were on. Please do not buy credits to get past this — a top-up will not clear a failed read, because the read, not the balance, is what stopped it.

  "It says I don't have enough credits"

  This is a completely different message, and it is a real answer rather than a failure. When you genuinely do not have enough credits for something, Alloy says what it needs, tells you your actual balance, and says: *"Your balance is N. Add credits and this will run."*

  Two things follow from that. First, this one *is* about your balance, so topping up is the correct next step. Second, it is never the same thing as "we couldn't check your access" — if your screen shows what it needs and your balance, you are reading the credits message; if it says we could not read or could not check, you are reading the failure message and nothing was spent.

  If a message you have quoted to us is ambiguous, we will ask you to read it back word for word rather than guess which one it is.

  "The audio won't play" / "the podcast episode won't load"

  If an episode does not play, the honest answer is that **the episode is not available to you right now**, and we will not guess at why on the spot. Alloy's audio has more than one reason an episode can be withheld — an episode that exists but is being held back is a different state from one that has not been published for that lesson at all — and the player shows the reason the server gives it rather than a generic error. Where there is no reason to show, it falls back to *"No episode has been published for this lesson yet."*

  Please send us:

  • the course you were in, • the lesson the episode belongs to, • whether it was the Lesson coverage or the Question walkthrough tab, and • the wording of anything the player showed you.

  With those we can look at the specific episode. We will not tell you it is a credits problem, a device problem or a licensing problem unless we have actually established it, because a confident wrong cause is worse than "we are checking".

  "The diagnostic won't start"

  If starting a diagnostic refuses with a temporarily unavailable message, or with **no questions available for this drill**, that is a problem on our side — the question bank for that course could not supply the diagnostic at that moment. Both of those refusals happen *before* any charge is worked out, so:

  • You were not charged. Nothing is spent on a diagnostic that never started. • Your free first diagnostic is intact. The free allowance on a course is only used up when a diagnostic is actually completed, so a diagnostic that refused to start, or that you opened and abandoned, has not consumed it. • It is an outage, not a paywall. It is not a limit on your account and not a sign that you did something wrong.

  Retrying a little later is the right move. If the same course refuses repeatedly, report it with the feedback button on that course's page, so it is filed against that course.

  If you were taking a paid retake and the charge went through but the diagnostic then failed to start, the refund happens automatically for the failure cases the server can see; anything outside that is recorded in Alloy's log. If your balance looks wrong after a failed retake, report it with the feedback button, naming the course and roughly when, so it is filed with the page it happened on.

  What we will always ask you for

  Whatever the problem, these three things let us find it quickly:

  1. The exact wording on your screen. Word for word if you can, or a screenshot. Alloy's messages are written to distinguish between very different situations, so the wording is the diagnosis. An error code on its own does not explain anything — send the sentence. 2. The course. Which of your courses you were in. 3. The page you were on. The surface or page (for example your Account, a track, a lesson, the labs), and what you expected to happen versus what actually happened.

  That last one is exactly what Alloy's own support page asks for — the surface or page you were on, and what you expected versus what happened — so you are not being asked for anything unusual.

  Reporting it from inside the app

  While you are signed in and on an in-app page, there is a round "Report an issue" button in the corner of the screen. It works in two steps, and the second step surprises people:

  1. Click the round button. Your cursor becomes a crosshair and a banner appears at the top reading *"Report a bug — click the element with the problem"*. 2. Click the thing that is broken, or press "Report whole page" if it is the whole page. Then pick a category — "Something broken" is the first one — and describe what happened.

  The button is hidden on Alloy's public pages — /welcome, /pricing, /learn, /catalog, /about and the sign-in pages — and it only appears for a signed-in learner on an in-app page. Note that the catalog — the Explore item in the menu, at /catalog — is reached from inside the app but still counts as a public page, so if you are standing there you will not see the button; move to another surface, or just tell us in this conversation instead.

  Check the panel you get back. A green "Thanks for your feedback!" means the report was recorded. An amber "Reporting is unavailable" with *"Your report was not saved. This is a problem on our side, not your connection."* means it was not saved — nothing you did went wrong, and you should tell us here instead so it is not lost. A red "Submission failed" also means it was not saved; tell us here as well. If the report was saved you may see a short reference id; it is worth quoting, but its absence does not mean the report failed.

  What we will not do

  We will not tell you your work is gone, we will not tell you credits were taken when an activity refused to start, and we will not invent a cause for something we have not looked at. We also will not put a time on a fix — when we have something concrete, we would rather tell you that than give you a date we cannot stand behind.

• What is included in an Alloy courseAlloy

  What is included in an Alloy course

  When you open a course on Alloy you land in a course workspace, and everything that belongs to that course hangs off a menu down the left-hand side. The menu holds up to eleven items, and the same set is used for every course — it is not assembled by hand per course.

  The eleven menu items are Dashboard, Scenarios, Practice, Practice Exams, Flashcards, Labs, Coach, Curriculum, Diagnostic, Interview and About the exam. **Lessons, Podcasts and the final exam are real parts of a course but are not menu items** — they are reached from inside the pages above. Please do not tell a customer to look for them in the menu.

  What each part is

  Dashboard is the course home page — where you land, and what everything else hangs off.

  Curriculum is the course's map of concepts. You can filter it and see where you stand concept by concept, and every concept has its own detail page you can open and read.

  Lessons are full written lessons, each on its own page, reached from the curriculum. Whether a particular lesson is open to you is decided before the text is sent to your browser — if it is not open you get a screen explaining that instead of the lesson body. Each course also declares which lessons it renders, so a lesson that exists elsewhere in Alloy is not automatically part of your course; only what your course renders reaches you.

  Practice is a picker that lets you choose what to drill and then launches a question session.

  Practice Exams is a separate launcher for full practice exams, and it quotes that course's own pass mark and exam size rather than a generic one.

  Flashcards is an interactive deck for that course.

  Scenarios is a grid of scenario exercises for that course.

  Coach is a per-course coaching workspace.

  Diagnostic is a short assessment used to place you and seed your readiness score.

  About the exam is a reference page built from your course's own exam blueprint — the exam code, the awarding organisation, the domain weightings and the question count all come from that course's blueprint, never from a fixed list.

  Interview is a multi-turn mock interview. Please read the note below before telling someone they have it.

  Podcasts are audio episodes attached to a course's lessons. The way a learner reaches them from inside the product is the curriculum: each lesson row there opens its own audio beside it. Each course also has a podcast index page that lists the episodes by lesson, at /tracks/<course id>/podcasts — but nothing in the course menu links to it, so a customer who wants that page needs the address. Please read the note further down about the dashboard's Podcasts band before pointing anyone at it.

  The final exam sits on its own separate screen, outside the course menu. It has its own readiness check, timed run and result, and you reach it from the dashboard or from Practice Exams rather than from the menu.

  Labs — only on one course

  Only the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations prep course has the Labs surface. That course excludes nothing from the menu; the other three exam-prep courses each declare Labs as excluded. On those three the Labs address does not resolve at all — it returns "not found", exactly as a mistyped address would. It is genuinely not a page on those courses rather than a page being hidden from you.

  Please never tell a customer that every Alloy course includes hands-on Labs. It is not true, and it is the single easiest thing to get wrong about the product.

  Why your menu may have fewer items than someone else's

  Two separate things can shorten the menu, and they are independent:

  1. The course itself can exclude a surface. That is how Labs is absent from three of the four exam-prep courses. 2. A route can be blocked for your account. Interview is the only menu item this currently affects. Its gate is closed by default — it is not open to a learner until an operator opens it — and while it is closed the Interview address is blocked as well, so the menu can never link you into a page you are not allowed to open. Note that this is not specific to cohort learners: closed is the default state, for everyone.

  So two learners on two different courses can honestly see different menus, and neither is broken.

  **Before you tell any customer that the mock Interview is part of their course, confirm it is actually available to them.** It is the one menu item that is closed by default, so the safe assumption is that a customer does not have it, and promising it to someone who cannot open it is a bad first impression of the whole product.

  About the Podcasts link on the dashboard

  There is a "Podcasts" band on the dashboard, and it currently sends everyone to one fixed course's podcast index rather than following the course you are studying. If a customer says the Podcasts link took them somewhere unexpected, that is why. Point them instead at the audio panel beside each lesson in their own curriculum — that is the route that is actually linked — or give them the address of their own course's podcast index, /tracks/<their course id>/podcasts. Please do not tell them the dashboard link will take them to their own course's podcasts.

  What a locked, blurred or "unverified" screen means

  Several parts of the app show a gate before their content: the flashcard deck, Labs, Coach, Scenarios, the practice picker and the practice exams. That is what the screen does — it is a description of what you will see, not a statement about what is or is not enforced elsewhere.

  **A gated screen can mean four genuinely different things, and they have four different answers.** Establish which one the customer is looking at before you mention money at all:

  1. A paid tier is needed. The content is shown blurred behind an overlay that links to pricing. This is the only one of the four where payment is the answer. 2. The free diagnostic has not been taken yet. The screen says "Take the free diagnostic first" and offers a link to start it. **No price is shown and none is owed.** Telling this customer to buy something is wrong. 3. Access could not be checked. The screen is marked "UNVERIFIED" and says "We couldn't check your access." This is a failure on our side, not a statement about the customer — nothing has been charged and nothing has been refused on the merits. The answer is to refresh and try again, and to report it with the feedback button if it persists. 4. The action is not permitted for this account — for example, not being signed in.

  Underneath, Alloy deliberately keeps these reasons separate rather than collapsing them into one "locked" message: needing credits, needing a seat, an access read that failed, and not being permitted are four distinct outcomes. **So never tell a customer that a blocked screen means they are out of credits.** A blocked screen is not a balance reading, and reading it as one has caused real customers with plenty of credit to be told they had none.

  On the two screens where Alloy is actually refusing something — the paid-tier overlay and the "take the free diagnostic first" screen — there is always a way to carry on without the gated feature: a "Keep going without it" link back to the course dashboard, sitting beside the primary button. The UNVERIFIED screen does not have that link. It offers only "Refresh the page to try again", because it is a failure on our side to fix rather than a refusal to work around. Please do not promise a "keep going" option to a customer who is looking at an UNVERIFIED screen.

  Two things we will not tell you, on purpose

  We will not quote you a count. How many lessons, questions, flashcards, scenarios, concepts or podcast episodes a course carries changes as the course is built out, and the number of files in the repository is not the number a learner is served. If a customer needs a count for a specific course, support will check it live rather than quote one from here.

  Anti-pattern drills are not something you will find. They were removed as a separate kind of exercise in August 2026. The teaching move survives inside the written lessons as contrast pairs, but there is no anti-pattern drill deck to open, so please do not describe one as available content.

  For what any of this costs, which lessons are free, and how credits work, see Alloy's credits and pricing answer rather than guessing from a screen.

• What Alloy is — the platform, the company that runs it, and what it sellsAlloy

  What Alloy is

  Alloy is an applied technical mastery platform for fast-changing technical fields, built by Memriq. The promise on the site is "Learn → Build → Prove → Apply to real code → Get found", and the footer on every public page says the same thing in one line: Alloy is an applied technical mastery platform for fast-changing fields — a Memriq company. In practice, what Alloy sells you today is exam preparation: the pricing page tells buyers that Alloy is exam prep for Anthropic's Claude certifications. The public product name is simply Alloy.

  The courses open to learners right now are the Claude certification exam-prep courses: Claude Certified Architect – Foundations, Claude Certified Associate – Foundations, Claude Certified Architect – Professional, and Claude Certified Developer – Foundations. The site derives what it shows from a single registry of open courses rather than from a number typed into the copy, so the catalogue on the site is the authority on what you can enter today. If a course is not listed there, it is not open to you, whatever else you may have read.

  Alloy is not affiliated with Anthropic

  This is the sentence Alloy publishes, and it is the sentence to repeat, whole:

  > Alloy builds preparation courses for these exams. It is not affiliated with Anthropic, and > buying a course here is not the exam or the certification.

  Alloy is not official, not endorsed, not authorized, not accredited and not partnered with Anthropic in any way. The certifications are Anthropic's; Alloy prepares you for them and nothing more. Finishing a track here confers no credential — the credential comes from sitting Anthropic's real exam, which Alloy neither administers nor scores. Anthropic's certification program is delivered through Pearson VUE; Alloy has no relationship with Pearson VUE either, and it is named only because that is where the exams are sat.

  If you tell us you never saw that disclaimer on the site, we will take your word for it. It is published on the public page that lists the courses — /learn, titled "What Alloy teaches" — inside the section listing the courses currently open. It is not in the footer and it is not repeated on every page you might have arrived through.

  Who runs Alloy

  Memriq. Alloy's public team page names one person — Keith Bourne, its Chief Agent Officer — and states the rest plainly: the team is Keith Bourne and the agents that build and run Alloy. What we will not do is tell you a person has picked up your question or will get back to you; if we do not know something, we will say so rather than promise a follow-up we cannot guarantee.

  Where Alloy lives

  The address is https://memriqalloy.ai. Use that one directly — it is the canonical address recorded both in the app and in Memriq's own company registry.

  What Alloy's scope rule is

  Alloy's stated rule is that every lesson exists because a numbered objective in the official exam guide requires it, and material that no objective asks for is not taught here — it is quarantined instead. That is checked mechanically: a scope check runs over the four certification courses and passes today, with all four judged in scope. Note what the check does and does not tell you: it proves that a course carries only what its exam guide asks for. It is not a measure of how much content a course contains, and we will not tell you a given course is complete or compare the four by volume.

  We also cannot paste exam-guide material — the objectives, the domain weightings, the task statements — to you. Those are handled as restricted content. For an exam's fee, length, question count or passing score, go to Anthropic; those are Anthropic's numbers, not ours.

  If you need something this answer does not cover — access, pricing, or what a specific course contains — ask, and we will answer from what the product actually does rather than guess.

• What Alloy does not have yet — podcast feeds, downloads, certificates, exports and schedulingAlloy

  There are things people reasonably expect Alloy to do that it does not do today. Below is the honest list, and the nearest thing that does exist for each. We are not going to give you a date for any of them, because we do not have one to give.

  Podcasts: no downloads, no RSS feed, no Apple or Spotify

  There is no download button anywhere in the episode player, so there is no supported way to save an episode and listen offline. No Alloy course publishes a podcast feed today either. The safe default for a course's audio is "in app only", which publishes nothing outside Alloy, and every live course is set that way — so there is no RSS feed, and nothing to subscribe to in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast app.

  What you can do instead: listen to episodes inside Alloy, on the lesson they belong to or from the course's podcast list. Some episodes carry a control that copies a public link to that episode — it appears only on episodes that have been made shareable, so if you do not see it on an episode, that episode is not shareable.

  No PDF, no printable certificate, no badge image

  Alloy does not generate a certificate document of any kind — no PDF, no printable page, no image badge. What Alloy issues is an in-app credential wallet with three levels, shown on your Proof page and marked earned or not.

  What you can do instead: export a portfolio as a JSON file, which you copy or download yourself — nothing is sent anywhere automatically. You choose which of three sections travel with it: credentials, report and projects. Credentials and the report are switched on to begin with; projects is off until you turn it on.

  No public link a third party can use to verify your credential

  There is no public verification page on Alloy. Every credential screen sits behind a sign-in, so nobody can look you up. If you want to show someone your record, you send them the export yourself; Alloy does not send it anywhere on your behalf.

  Note also that Alloy is a preparation provider and is not affiliated with Anthropic. Alloy's own credential is Alloy's; it is not the Claude certification, and buying a course here is not the exam or the certification.

  No self-serve cancellation — and closing or exporting your account is on the Account page

  Your account page has no cancel button and no unsubscribe link — the only subscription control there is a link to the pricing page.

  Closing your account and exporting your data are different: both are on your Account page, under "Your Alloy data". "Export my data" saves a file of everything Alloy holds about you (the portfolio export above is a separate thing — a copy of your proof, not of your account data). "Close my Alloy account" asks you to type your sign-in address, then deletes your Alloy progress, exam history, certificates and any unused purchased credits, straight away and for good; your Memriq sign-in and other Memriq apps are not touched, and if you sign in to Alloy again later you start a new, empty account.

  Support cannot do any of these for you: changing a billing plan and closing an account are both on the short list of things a support agent is blocked from performing. The Terms page sets out how refunds and cancelling work. Ask here what cancelling your subscription would mean for your current period and your credits before you decide; do not assume it works the way another service does.

  No exam scheduling or booking through Alloy

  Alloy does not book exams. There is no exam scheduling or booking control anywhere in Alloy today — not on the Account screen, which carries your identity, billing, credits and goals and nothing that schedules anything, and not on a course. Booking a real Claude certification exam is done with Pearson VUE, not with Alloy.

  No FAQ or help-centre page

  Alloy has no help centre and no FAQ page. This assistant is the help centre.

  Alloy does publish a privacy policy at /privacy and terms at /terms, linked from the footer of every public page. The refund policy lives in the terms, under "Plans, billing and credits": 30 days from the charge, for credits you have not used and for a membership period whose allowance you have not used. Quote it or link it; do not paraphrase it.

  If somebody asks what they will get back, the honest split still holds: the policy says what the window is, and whether a particular refund is approved is decided under that policy, never in this chat. Ask the actual question — what they were charged for, and what they want to happen — and take it from there. Never promise a refund or give a timeframe for money arriving.

  Nothing that shows you who viewed your evidence

  There is no screen in Alloy where you can see which employers looked at your evidence, when, or under what consent. If you want to know, ask here and we will find out what can be answered.

  Employer visibility is one switch, not a per-employer choice

  Employer visibility is a single on/off: you are visible to employers, or you are not. It records your consent against every employer rather than a named one, so there is no way today to allow one employer and refuse another.

  Two things to know before you go looking for the switch. Its default is off — with no consent record, Alloy reads you as not opted in. And the control itself is currently registered as hidden for ordinary learners, so it may not appear on your account or your Proof page at all yet; if you cannot find it, that is expected rather than a bug. Ask us to confirm the current state for your account rather than assuming either way.

  There is also no anonymised talent pool and no role matching — an employer browsing candidates is not matched to you by role, and Alloy does not publish a pool view. If you have read a description of either, it is not something you can use today.

  When a screen promises one of these

  A heading can promise more than the control behind it does. The one worth reading carefully is the Proof page's export card, headed "Export to Topsway": the export is a JSON file you copy or download yourself, and Alloy sends nothing to Topsway or anywhere else on your behalf.

  If a screen promises you something and the button does nothing, tell us what the screen said and what happened when you pressed it, and use the round "Report an issue" button in the corner of the signed-in workspace pages — it is deliberately absent from the public pages such as pricing and the catalogue. It asks you to click the element with the problem first, or you can choose "Report whole page". That report captures the page and what you clicked, which is far more useful to us than a description.

  We will not tell you a feature is coming, give you an ETA, or promise that a request gets filed somewhere on your behalf. What we will do is tell you plainly what exists today and take an accurate report of what you hit.

• Alloy pricing — what Alloy costs, subscription plans, prices, credit packs and the free tierAlloy

  The short answer

  Alloy's pricing model is one sentence, and it is the sentence at the top of our own pricing page: **content is a subscription, heavy agentic work is metered with credits, and we never sell unlimited inference.** Studying — the tracks, the lessons, the quizzes, the spaced repetition — comes with your plan. The expensive machine-driven things, like a repo scan or a generated lab, draw on credits.

  For the current price of anything, please look at the pricing page: https://memriqalloy.ai/pricing. That page is where Alloy publishes its current prices, and we would rather you read the figure there than take one from us — support does not quote prices from memory. What you are actually charged is set in Memriq's Vault billing platform rather than in this document, so if the page and a charge ever disagree, report it with the feedback button on the page showing the number, so it is filed against that page, and keep your receipt. If you tell us what you see on the pricing page, we will happily talk you through it.

  What Alloy sells

  There are six shapes of thing on the price list, plus one product that is not a learner plan at all:

  • Free — a $0 tier with no card required and no time limit. • Core — a subscription, offered monthly or annually. • Premium — a subscription, offered monthly or annually. • Pro Code-Aware — a subscription, offered monthly. It is the tier the pricing page lists Code Alloy Scan under. • Architect Foundations Standalone — a one-time purchase of a single course path (the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations track) rather than a subscription. • Credit packs — a one-time top-up. The pricing page sells them as overage for the heavy agentic actions: Code Alloy Scan, lab generation, deep tutoring, portfolio generation, interview simulations and deep freshness reports. That is what the packs are for on the price list, and it is not a complete list of everything that draws on your balance — a diagnostic retake draws on it too. If your question is what spends a credit, ask us about credits and we will answer that properly rather than from this page. • The Employer Seat — a separate product for hiring, not an Alloy learner plan. It is billed on its own and it has its own, separate credit balance: the unlock credits on an employer seat cannot be spent on learner surfaces, and learner credits cannot be spent on candidate unlocks. If someone is asking about an Employer Seat charge, do not answer it with Alloy's learner plan terms — they are different products.

  If you are buying credit packs, please buy one pack per checkout rather than setting a quantity, and buy further packs in separate checkouts if you need a larger top-up, so each one lands correctly.

  What the free tier gets you

  Free is real, and it is meant to answer the question "would I pass?" before you spend anything. As the pricing page describes it, it includes:

  • A full practice diagnostic on any of the four open exams, with every area reported as questions right out of questions asked. The first diagnostic on a course is free **once per course, not once per account** — so taking your free diagnostic on one certification does not use up the free one on the other three. • The exam-strategy lesson and its podcast, free on every course. By default that lesson is free wherever it sits in a course. • The first two lessons of every course, with their podcasts. They are free by position, so this follows a course even if its lessons are reordered. • A place to store and verify certifications you already hold — adding and verifying an existing certification is a free surface and no balance is read for it. • One account that covers all four open exams. The four are the four Claude-certification exam-prep courses; nothing else in the catalogue is enterable today.

  Two honest caveats, so nothing surprises you:

  • Free still means signed in. Every Alloy surface, including the free ones, is behind login. • "Free by default" is exactly what it says. The free lessons and the free exam-strategy lesson are defaults that an operator setting can change on a specific lesson, in either direction. If your screen says a lesson is paid and this page says it should be free, trust your screen and report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem.

  Being on the free tier does not mean there is nothing on your account that could ever have been charged. The one-time purchases — the Architect Foundations Standalone and credit packs — can be bought without any subscription at all. If you are asking about a charge you can see, open Plan and usage on your account page — it shows what the billing platform recorded — rather than assuming it cannot exist.

  Before you buy

  Please do not treat anything we say in chat as confirmation that a purchase has gone through or that a particular card will be charged. Alloy's billing configuration is held in our billing platform rather than in this document, and support does not confirm payment status from memory. If you are about to buy, or you are checking whether a payment worked, open Plan and usage on your account page: it reads the actual state of your plan and purchases from the billing platform. If it cannot read it, it says so — refresh and try again, and if it still cannot, report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem.

  What this page does not cover

  Refunds, cancellation and proration terms are not stated here, deliberately — we will not quote you a refund window, a proration rule or a cancellation term from this page. If that is your question, the Terms page (/terms) states them under "Plans, billing and credits". Alloy's own support page points you at the support chat for exactly this: billing, your tier, credits, a track, or a problem you hit.

• The Alloy support assistant — who you are talking to, that it is an AI, and what happens when it cannot answerAlloy

  I am software, not a person. If that is the whole of your question, that is the whole of the answer — and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you work it out.

  More precisely: I am the Alloy support assistant, run by Bridge, Memriq's shared support system, on Alloy's behalf. Alloy's own support page says so on the page itself. There is a language model behind what I write. Nobody is reading over my shoulder as I type this, and no person replies in this chat — Memriq runs its support with agents, so there is no button that hands you to a human and no queue where one picks your question up later.

  How I actually answer you

  When you send a message, I search Alloy's own published support material for it and answer from what I find. Two rules govern that search, and both are enforced in the code rather than being a matter of good intentions: only material marked live is searched, and only material marked usable by an assistant is searched. Anything Alloy has marked as internal is not something I can read to you.

  What comes back then splits two ways:

  • **If I can ground an answer in that material and I am confident in it, you get the answer straight away**, in this chat. • If I cannot ground it, or I am not confident, you are shown nothing I drafted. You get Alloy's own sentence instead: *"I don't have a sure answer to that from what I know about Alloy, so I won't guess. Ask me another way and I'll try again."* That is deliberate: an ungrounded draft is exactly the kind that reads well and is wrong.

  So if every message you send comes back with that sentence, it is not you doing something wrong. It means nothing you have asked could be grounded in the published material — try naming the screen or the feature you mean.

  Things I am told, in so many words, not to do

  The instructions I am given include, verbatim: *never invent facts, URLs, prices, dates, names, or product details you don't know*, and *be honest about confidence*. I would rather tell you I do not know than give you a confident answer about your own money that turns out to be wrong.

  What I always answer with that sentence, however confident I sound

  Some messages are never answered from a draft, whatever I could write. That decision is made from the words in your message, not from how sure I am:

  • a legal threat — a lawyer, a lawsuit, a court; • a request to delete your data or to be forgotten; • a message that reads as angry or seriously frustrated.

  For those, the pages that hold the real answer are named in Alloy's other support material: the Terms page sets out how a refund is requested, and the Privacy page sets out how to ask for your account and data to be deleted. Your Account page shows your plan, credits and progress.

  What I cannot do at all — this is a hard list, in code

  There are seven actions the support system refuses outright, and refusing is not a judgement call — the request is rejected before anything else happens, whoever asks and however it is phrased:

  1. issue a refund 2. change a credit balance 3. delete an account 4. change a billing plan 5. send a press reply 6. make a legal commitment 7. expose infrastructure details

  So no wording of a request to me moves money, changes your balance, or removes your account.

  What I will not assert about your own account

  I do not read your record, and I will not tell you what your balance is, what you have bought, how far through a course you are, or whether you are ready for an exam. Ask me about any of those and I will point you to your Account page, which shows them. If a number there looks wrong, report it with the feedback button — the ? in the bottom-right corner — and it is filed as an issue against the page you were on.

  The same goes for numbers generally: Alloy support does not quote prices, content counts, exam lengths or response times from memory. There is separate Alloy material explaining why, and where to read each of those instead.

  Where to find me

  The support chat is the round chat button in the bottom-right corner of every signed-in Alloy page, directly above the ? feedback button. The two are different: the chat button opens this conversation; the ? button reports a problem with the page you are on. The Support page in the menu has a button that opens this chat too.

  Two things that are not me

  • The Coach is a different thing. The Coach is the AI inside a course that answers questions about the material you are studying. It is not support, and it does not know anything about your billing. Alloy has separate material on what AI a learner can use. • The feedback button is a different thing. The ? button files a report against the page you are on, with what you picked on the screen. Use it for something broken; use this chat for a question.

  Staying on topic

  If a message looks like an attempt to get me to ignore my instructions, I answer with a plain redirect — *"I'm here to help with questions about this product and your account"* — rather than playing along. That is not me being evasive about a real question; ask the real question and I will answer it.

  If you would rather just have the short version

  I am an AI. I answer from Alloy's published support material, or I say plainly that I do not have a sure answer and ask you to put it another way. I never move money, never touch your account, and never guess at an answer I cannot source.

• Signing in, logging in, and making an Alloy accountAlloy

  Where Alloy lives

  Alloy is at https://memriqalloy.ai. That is the address to use — type it in directly. Please don't rely on any other spelling of the address getting you there: a redirect from the older hostnames is built but is deliberately switched off, so another spelling may simply not resolve. Use https://memriqalloy.ai.

  Can I just sign up and start today?

  Yes. Alloy is open. Anyone can make a free Alloy account — no invitation, no waitlist and no card.

  1. Go to https://memriqalloy.ai/auth/signup (the Start free link on the sign-in page goes there too). 2. Press Create your free account with Google and choose your Google account. 3. You come back to Alloy signed in, with a free account made for that address, and you can open a course straight away.

  Signing in again later is the same button on https://memriqalloy.ai/auth/signin — **Continue with Google**. Google is the way to create a new account because Google confirms the address is yours.

  Can I use an email and password instead?

  Only for an account that already has a password. The email and password fields on the sign-in page sign in an existing account. A brand-new account cannot be created by typing an address and a password, because nothing would prove the address belongs to you; a new password account needs an invitation link sent to that address. If you do not have one, use Continue with Google — it works for any address Google can confirm.

  If you type the right password and still cannot get in, the screen tells you which of these happened: the password was wrong, the account is locked for a short while after several attempts, or the account could not be checked just now. Each one has its own sentence, so go by what the screen says.

  Is there a waitlist?

  Not for getting into Alloy. You do not need to join anything to make an account.

  Some courses that are not open yet carry a "Join the waitlist" form on their public page at https://memriqalloy.ai/learn/<slug>. That list is per course: it records that you want that particular course when it opens. It has nothing to do with whether you can sign in, and joining one does not join you for another.

  Sign-in is not working

  • Try again in a few minutes. Trying again is safe: a repeat attempt never makes a second account. • Read the screen you land on. If a sign-in cannot finish, the page names what happened in plain words rather than leaving you on a blank screen. • Check you are on https://memriqalloy.ai, not another spelling. • Ask here. The support button in the corner of the sign-in page works before you have an account, so you can ask from the screen you are stuck on. Tell us the page you were on, the exact wording you saw and the address you were signing in with.

  Support will not hand you an email address to write to instead; this chat is the support channel.

  Once you are signed in, Alloy's in-app "Report an issue" button is there too. Pressing it starts an element picker: the cursor becomes a crosshair and a banner asks you to click the element with the problem, with a "Report whole page" button if you would rather skip that step.

  Is there a free trial, or a free diagnostic I can try first?

  Making an account is free, and that is the way to try Alloy. Every Alloy *learning* surface — including the free ones — is behind sign-in; there is no public taster and no diagnostic you can take as a visitor. Starting a practice session is refused outright without a session.

  Once you are signed in, the first diagnostic on a course is free — once per course, not once per account, and a retake on that same course costs credits.

  The short version

  • Address: https://memriqalloy.ai • Anyone can make a free account: Start free → Create your free account with Google. • Email and password sign in an existing account; a new account is made with Google. • No waitlist for getting in. Course waitlists on /learn/<slug> are only for courses not open yet. • Stuck at sign-in? Use the support button on that page.

• Alloy podcasts — lesson audio episodes and how to listenAlloy

  Alloy podcasts are audio episodes that belong to the lessons in your course. Every episode is attached to a specific lesson — you listen to the podcast for a lesson, rather than to a standalone show.

  The two kinds of episode

  A lesson can have up to two episodes, and there are only two kinds:

  • Lesson coverage — the whole lesson read out loud, end to end: the ideas, why they matter, and where people get them wrong. Start here when the lesson is new to you. • Question walkthrough — real exam questions from that lesson, worked out loud, including why each wrong option is the tempting one. It lands best once you have already tried the practice set for that lesson.

  Those are the names you will see in the app. There is no third kind of episode, and there is no course-level or standalone podcast.

  Where to listen

  You need to be signed in — the podcast pages are behind your account, so a signed-out visitor will not reach them.

  There are three places to press play:

  1. On the lesson page itself. The player is built into the lesson, with a tab for each episode the lesson has. 2. From the curriculum list on your course dashboard. Each lesson row has its own podcast control that opens a panel with the player in it. 3. From your course's podcast index, at /tracks/<courseId>/podcasts, which lists the lessons in that course and the episodes available for each one.

  Once something is playing, a small player bar stays with you as you move around the app, so audio keeps going while you read another page. It is the same player, not a second one — so the controls and the position stay in sync wherever you are.

  One thing worth knowing: the Podcasts shortcut on the dashboard always opens one particular course's podcast index, not necessarily the course you are currently studying. If you land somewhere unexpected, open the podcast index for your own course from that course's pages.

  What the player can do

  • Play and pause. • Skip back and skip forward fifteen seconds at a time. • Six playback speeds — 0.8×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, 1.75× and 2×. • A scrub bar to move anywhere in the episode. • A chapter list, shown when that episode's timings have actually been measured. When they have not, the player says so rather than showing chapter marks that would jump to the wrong place — so please do not count on a specific episode having chapters until you have opened it. • Mark this moment — a bookmark you can drop while the episode is playing, saved to your account so you can come back to it. The control works on the episode that is currently playing. • A transcript. It shows who said each line and where it falls in the episode. You can read it with the audio paused or never started at all, and you can select and copy the text. Transcripts and timestamps depend on what was measured for that particular episode, so we cannot promise them for a specific one in advance.

  Does it remember where I stopped?

  Yes. Your listening position is saved to your account, so when you come back to an episode it picks up where you left off rather than starting again from the beginning.

  Can I download episodes or subscribe to a feed?

  There is no download button in the player. No Alloy course publishes a public podcast feed today — there is nothing to subscribe to in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and no RSS address to add to a podcast app. Listening happens through your Alloy account.

  Is a podcast free, or does it cost credits?

  Some are free and some are not. A podcast normally takes the same free-or-paid setting as the lesson it belongs to, and a locked podcast asks you to spend credits rather than saying it does not exist. The full rule — which lessons and podcasts are free, and what to do when something is locked — is in Which lessons and podcasts are free. If you would rather we just checked, ask us about the specific lesson.

  An episode is not playing

  First check whether the podcast is locked rather than missing: a locked one asks for credits, and that is a different problem with a different fix.

  Otherwise: the podcast index only lists episodes that are ready to play, so an episode that is missing there, or that will not start, is simply not available to you right now. Do not assume a reason beyond that — report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem, naming the course, the lesson and which of the two episodes you were trying to play.

  What we will check for you

  Two things this assistant will not guess at; it reads them from your course instead:

  • Which episodes exist for your course. Episode availability is decided per lesson and per episode, so we will check your course rather than quote you a number. • Whether a particular lesson's podcast is part of what you already have access to. Access to a podcast is set per lesson — and can be set for a podcast on its own — so we will check the lesson you are asking about rather than give you a blanket rule.

• How to report a bug in Alloy — the feedback button and your reference numberAlloy

  Where the button is

  Alloy has a report button built into the app. It is a small round button in the **bottom-right corner of the screen, and hovering over it shows the label "Report an issue"**.

  You will only see it while you are signed in and on an in-app page. It is deliberately kept off Alloy's public pages, so it is not there on /welcome, /pricing, /learn, /catalog, /about or the sign-in pages. Please note that /catalog — the menu item labelled Explore — counts as a public page for this purpose, so you can be signed in, on a page you reached from the menu, and still have no report button in the corner. Being signed in on an in-app page is what the button needs, but it is not a guarantee it is there — it can also be switched off for maintenance. If you cannot see the button, tell us which page you are on and we will work out where to send you instead.

  The two steps — both of them

  Pressing the button does not open a form straight away. It starts an element picker, and this is the step people miss:

  1. Press the round "Report an issue" button. Your cursor turns into a crosshair and a banner appears at the top of the screen reading *"Report a bug — click the element with the problem"*. Hovering highlights whatever is under your cursor. Pressing Esc cancels. 2. Click the thing that is wrong — the broken button, the wrong number, the panel that will not load. If the whole page is the problem, or nothing in particular is clickable, press "Report whole page" in that same banner.

  If you press the button and only get a crosshair, nothing is broken — that is the picker waiting for your second click.

  Then the report panel opens. Choose a category, add a description, and press Submit Feedback.

  Which category to choose

  There are five categories. Pick the first one, "Something broken", when a feature does not work. The others are *Confusing*, *Slow / stuck*, *Missing feature* and *Other*.

  You have to choose a category — Submit stays greyed out until you do. The description box is optional, but please use it: tell us what you expected to happen and what happened instead. That sentence is usually the difference between a report we can act on and one we cannot.

  How you know it was saved

  The panel tells you, and there are three different endings — one good, two not:

  • A green panel with a tick reading "Thanks for your feedback!" means your report was saved. • An amber panel reading "Reporting is unavailable", with the line *"Your report was not saved. This is a problem on our side, not your connection"*, means the report did not reach us. Nobody was notified. Nothing you did caused it. • A red panel reading "Submission failed", with the line *"Check your connection and try again"*, also means the report did not reach us. This one can be your connection or a failure further up on our side — we cannot tell which from the panel alone.

  After either the amber or the red panel, the form comes back after about three seconds with what you typed still in it, so you can press Submit again without retyping. If it fails again, please tell us the details here in this conversation so they are not lost.

  If you are asking us whether a report you sent arrived, we will ask you which of those three panels you saw. Pressing Submit on its own is not enough for us to say it was saved.

  About the reference number

  When a report is saved, the green panel usually shows a reference under "Your reference" that you can quote back to us. Sometimes a report is saved and no reference is shown — the panel just closes after a couple of seconds. That is a known and accepted behaviour, not a failure: **a missing reference is not evidence that your report did not go through.** If you have a reference, quote it to us — it is the id your report was stored under. If you do not, tell us the page you were on and roughly when, and that is enough.

  What we will not tell you

  We do not publish a response time for reports, and we will not promise you that a particular report will be replied to or resolved by a given date. If you have a question about the problem itself, ask it here in the support chat rather than waiting on the report.

• How Alloy credits work — your credit balance and what spends itAlloy

  One balance, not one per course

  A credit is a unit on a single balance attached to you, the learner. You have one credit balance, and it is the same balance everywhere in Alloy — it is not per course, not per exam and not per feature. Studying four courses does not give you four balances.

  What actually spends credits

  Your monthly plan allowance is always spent first. Credits you bought are only used once the allowance for the month has run out. You do not choose between them and there is nothing to switch — it happens automatically, and it is why a busy month uses up the credits that would have expired anyway before it touches the ones you paid for.

  Only these things take credits off your balance:

  A diagnostic retake. Your first diagnostic on a course is free, and the free one is **per course** — using it on one course does not use it up on the others. Your own diagnostic page for that course is the only authority on whether your free attempt is still available.

  A retake on the same course costs 1 credit per question you are actually served. The number shown on your diagnostic page before you start is the size we aim to serve and is the most you can be charged; if the question bank hands you fewer, you are charged for fewer. A diagnostic is never longer than 24 questions, so a retake can never cost more than 24 credits.

  An interview simulation. 5 credits, charged once when the session starts. The turns and the debrief afterwards are not charged again.

  A Code Scan. The scan shows you a quote before you press the button, and that quote is a ceiling, not a bill. You are charged only when the scan completes, and only for the lessons the scan could actually judge — if it completed but no lesson could be judged, nothing is charged at all. The built-in default is 50 credits per lesson with a 500-credit ceiling on a single scan, but the figure on your own quote is the one that governs.

  An employer unlocking a candidate — one unlock credit, drawn from the employer's own separate wallet, never from a learner's. See the last section.

  What needs credits but does not spend them

  Coach, Labs, Flashcards, Scenarios, the practice picker and Practice Exams sit behind a check on whether you hold credits — a balance above zero. It is a gate, not a meter. Opening them, using them, or using them repeatedly does not deduct anything.

  Some of these surfaces do show you a credit figure, and it is not a mistake. A scenario drill and a lesson outside the free set are each quoted at a floor of 1 credit, and you see that number when your balance does not cover it. That figure is what you have to hold, not what gets taken — starting the drill or opening the lesson does not deduct it.

  So none of these has a per-use price that ticks your balance down as you use it: opening them, or using them repeatedly, deducts nothing. The four things in the section above are the only ones that actually take credits off your balance. Whether a particular lesson or podcast is in the free set is decided per lesson — see the answer on which lessons and podcasts are free.

  If we cannot read your balance

  Sometimes the balance read itself fails on our side. When that happens, **nothing is served and nothing is charged**, and the screen says so in as many words — that we could not read your credit balance, that this is a problem on our side, and that it is not a statement that your balance is zero or that your plan lapsed.

  This distinction is deliberate and it matters: a failed read is an outage, not a verdict about your money. If you are seeing "we couldn't check your access", you have not been charged, you have not lost anything, and the right next step is to try again in a moment rather than to buy anything.

  If you genuinely do not have enough credits

  That is a different, separately named refusal. It tells you what the thing costs, tells you what your balance actually is, and offers you a top-up — "top up your credits and this will run". It is not a denial and it is not a statement that you are not allowed to use the feature. You are being told a number is short, and the number is shown to you.

  Do credits expire?

  Credits on your balance do not expire while your account is open — whether you bought them or they came with your cohort or an access rule. They stay on your balance until you spend them, and they carry over from month to month.

  Your plan's monthly allowance is different: it refreshes every month and does not carry over. Whatever is left of a month's allowance when the month ends is gone. That is why the allowance is always spent first — the credits that expire get used before the credits that do not.

  If your account is closed, any unused credits go with it and cannot be restored. That applies to credits you bought as well as to the allowance. If you are thinking about closing your account and you have credits you have paid for, ask us first.

  This answer was published on 8 September 2026. Before that date Alloy had not published an expiry rule, and support was right to decline to state one.

  Refunds

  Credits. You can request a refund within 30 days of purchase for credits you have not used. We refund the unused portion to your original payment method. Credits you have already spent are not refundable — the work they paid for has been done.

  Membership. You can request a refund within 30 days of a charge if you have not used the usage allowance included in that period. Once you have used it, that period is not refundable, but you can cancel at any time and you will not be charged again.

  How to ask. Email hi@memriq.ai from the address on your account, with the date of the charge. Alloy's support agent answers within 5 business days and, where the refund is approved, we return the money within 10 business days.

  A refund only takes back the kind of credit it paid for. Refunding a membership charge takes back that period's allowance and never touches credits you bought. Refunding a credit pack takes back that pack's credits and never touches your allowance.

  This policy was published on 8 September 2026. Before that date Alloy had no stated refund window, and support was right to say so.

  Buying credits

  Buy one credit pack per checkout. If you have already put more than one pack through a single checkout, do not assume the credits multiplied — compare your receipt with the balance on your Account page, and if they disagree report it with the feedback button on that page so it is filed against it.

  Alloy does not sell an unlimited plan. Content is a subscription; the heavy agentic work is metered with credits, and unlimited inference is not something we sell on any tier. If someone tells you a plan includes unlimited credits, that is not our pricing.

  We also do not promise starter or welcome credits when you create an account. If you expected credits to be on your balance and they are not there, open Plan and usage on your account page, which reads the actual state; if it still looks wrong, report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem rather than assuming what should have happened.

  Employer credits are a different wallet

  An employer's unlock credits and a learner's credits are **two separate balances, deliberately, in both directions.** Employer unlock credits cannot be spent on learner surfaces, and learner credits cannot be spent on candidate unlocks. Being an employer with unlocks available does not give you a learner balance, and holding learner credits does not let you unlock a candidate packet.

  An unlock, once bought, belongs to the organisation — a colleague at the same employer does not pay again for a candidate the company has already unlocked.

• The free diagnostic, and what a diagnostic retake costs in creditsAlloy

  What the diagnostic is

  The diagnostic is a baseline. It draws questions across the course's domains rather than from a single topic, apportioned across those domains by the weighting Alloy holds for that course and capped by how many questions actually exist in each domain — so it is a spread across the exam, not a guarantee that every domain appears. Every question asks you for a confidence rating from 1 to 10, and that rating is required before the answer is accepted.

  It is not timed and there is no countdown. The clock on the session counts up — it reads "NN:NN elapsed" — and there is a Pause button on the session bar. Pause stops that clock and nothing else: your question, your selection and any answer in progress are untouched. It does not submit anything and it does not save your place, and because nothing is counting down, pausing does not buy you extra time.

  We do not publish an estimate of how long a diagnostic takes, and the diagnostic itself has no time limit, so please do not quote one.

  ⛔ That is true of the diagnostic only. Alloy's final exam is a different surface and it is timed: it counts down from a limit shown on the exam page, and when the clock reaches zero the paper is handed in automatically. Never generalise the diagnostic's lack of a clock into "nothing in Alloy is timed" — see the final-exam answer for that one.

  When you finish, you get a full results screen: your score, per-domain bars, your strengths and weak spots, an insight into how well-calibrated your confidence ratings were, your seeded readiness ring, and a coach narrative written for that sitting. Each completed sitting keeps its own results page, so the same screen can be opened again later from that sitting's own link. There is no "past diagnostics" list on the course's diagnostic page today — that page offers you a start button and a way back to the dashboard, and nothing else. If you cannot find your way back to a completed sitting, report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem — the sitting itself is kept.

  How many questions is it? That number is decided per course by Alloy, on the server, and we will not quote you a length from memory or from another course. Where it becomes visible to you is your own diagnostic page for that course once your free attempt has been used: that page then quotes the retake price in credits, and because a retake is one credit per question, the price and the length are the same number. Before your free attempt is used the page tells you it is free without printing a length, and if it cannot read your history it deliberately quotes nothing at all.

  When it is free — the exact condition

  Your first diagnostic on a course is free, once per course. It is a separate free attempt on each course you can open, not one free attempt across your whole account.

  The free attempt is used up only when the diagnostic is completed. Opening it and closing the tab does not use it. If you come back to that course's diagnostic page, it will normally pick up the same session where you stopped, still free, with nothing charged. We say "normally" on purpose: the handle that reopens an unfinished session is written on a best-effort basis, so occasionally there is nothing to return to and the next start is a fresh draw.

  If we cannot confirm whether you have already used your free diagnostic, you keep it. Alloy is built never to charge you because a read of your history failed, and when we cannot read that history the page deliberately quotes you no price at all rather than guessing.

  Your own diagnostic page for each course is the only authority on whether your free attempt there is still available — please do not assume a fixed number of unused free diagnostics on your account.

  What a retake costs

  A retake costs one credit for each question actually served. The number your diagnostic page shows for that course is what Alloy aims to serve, it is what the page quotes you, and it is the most you can be charged — the price you are shown and the amount debited come from the same figure. If the question bank cannot supply that full number, Alloy refuses to start the session rather than serving a shorter, cheaper diagnostic.

  If your balance is unlimited, a retake is allowed through and your balance is never decremented — it will not cost you credits.

  You can retake the diagnostic; a retake re-draws from that course's question bank and re-seeds your readiness score. The page's own wording is that a retake "draws a different set of questions" — read that as a fresh draw, not a promise of no repeats: a diagnostic serves exactly the configured number, so how much a retake overlaps your last sitting depends on how large that course's bank is.

  When a retake is charged, and what happens if it goes wrong

  A retake is charged at the start, before the diagnostic session exists. That is deliberate — it means a shortfall is refused cleanly with nothing created — but it also means that if you start a paid retake and abandon it, those credits are not automatically returned to you.

  Alloy refunds you automatically only for failures the server itself observes while setting the session up. It cannot compensate every case, and the code says so plainly — a process that dies between the charge and the refund is outside what it can see.

  If you were charged for a retake and got nothing, report it with the feedback button on the diagnostic page, saying when it happened, and do not wait for it to fix itself. When an automatic refund is attempted and fails, the amount you are owed is recorded in Alloy's log; when the refund never got a chance to run, there is nothing on file and your report is the only record of it. Either way, report it — the log is not a queue you are already in.

  What the refusal messages mean

  • "diagnostic temporarily unavailable" — this is our content problem, not yours. It means we could not resolve a diagnostic for that course. It happens before any charge and costs you nothing. • "diagnostic bank cannot supply the required N questions" or **"no questions available for this drill"** — again ours, again before any charge, again free. It does not mean you are blocked, restricted, or have used something up. • A permission-shaped refusal on a retake does not mean your account is restricted. On this path it means we could not read your credit balance, so nothing was served and nothing was charged. It is our problem, and it is worth trying again in a moment. • A refusal that names credits and shows your balance is the different one: that is a genuine shortfall, and topping up clears it.

  Is a retake score comparable to my first one?

  No — and please read it that way. A retake is a fresh baseline on a different form of the diagnostic, and the forms are not verified to be equally difficult. A lower number on a retake does not mean you got worse; it can simply mean you drew a harder form. Alloy's own wording is that a retake is "a fresh baseline rather than a score to beat" — use the per-domain detail, not the headline number, to decide what to study next.

• The final exam and why it stays locked until you are readyAlloy

  What Alloy's final exam is

  Each of the four courses you can enter on Alloy — Claude Certified Architect – Foundations, Claude Certified Associate – Foundations, Claude Certified Architect – Professional and Claude Certified Developer – Foundations — has a final exam of its own. It lives on its own page, separate from the course's lessons and practice, and it is gated: it opens when your readiness for that course is high enough.

  Alloy's final is not the Anthropic certification exam. It is Alloy's own final, written to mirror the certification the course prepares you for, and the card before you start says "Mirrors" and then names that exam when the course has one. Alloy builds preparation courses for those exams; it is not affiliated with Anthropic, and buying a course here is not the exam or the certification. Sitting Alloy's final does not certify you with anybody, and passing it is not a substitute for sitting the real exam.

  What passing it does earn is Alloy's own credential: the Verified Final Exam Pass, recorded against your account the moment the attempt is graded as passed. Where that pass can be viewed depends on which parts of the product are open to your cohort, so if you want to see it or show it to someone, ask us and we will check what is available to you rather than sending you to a page that may not be open yet.

  What opens it — readiness, per course

  The final stays closed until your readiness for that course reaches a high enough band. Readiness runs on a four-step ladder: Not ready → Almost ready → Ready → Strongly ready. By default the final opens at Ready. A course can carry its own readiness policy with a different cut point, so treat "Ready" as the default rather than a universal rule, and treat what your own exam page shows you as the answer for your course.

  Readiness is decided per course, and no amount of strength elsewhere opens a course you have not studied. The score blends four factors: two that describe you generally (mastery and calibration) and two that are about *this* course specifically (how much of its material you have covered, and how much of its exam blueprint you have covered). The per-course pair counts double. On top of that, each of the two per-course factors has a hard floor — below it, the score is capped beneath the unlock band no matter how strong the other factors are. So if you have covered almost none of a course, its final will not open however well you are doing elsewhere. That floor is deliberate: it was added because learners were reaching "Ready" on courses they had not studied at all.

  When the final has not opened, the page does not show a Start button at all. It shows a card headed "This opens when your readiness reaches Ready", your current readiness band, and guidance for closing the gap:

  • If you are Not ready: "You are not ready for the final yet. Build coverage and mastery across this course's concepts in Practice and Labs — the gate unlocks at 'ready'." • If you are Almost ready: "You're almost there. Close the remaining weak and not-started concepts in Practice; the final unlocks once your readiness reaches 'ready'."

  There is a link straight to Practice on that card, which is the fastest route from either message.

  Two things support will not do. We will not quote you a readiness score or tell you how many points you still need — the card shows a distance line only when the system actually measured both figures, and it deliberately shows nothing rather than a made-up number, so we will not invent one either. And the readiness gate cannot be waived, skipped or lifted by support. There is no bypass; the only thing that opens it is your readiness on that course going up.

  It is timed, and the clock is real

  The final is timed. When you start, the exam page shows the time limit for that course and counts down from it. When the clock reaches zero the paper is locked and handed in automatically — the time limit is enforced, not advisory. Whatever you have answered at that moment is what gets graded.

  You rate your confidence on each question as you go. That requirement gates handing the paper in early: the Submit button stays disabled until every question has an answer and a confidence. When the clock runs out that requirement is lifted by design and the paper is submitted regardless of which confidences you set.

  We do not quote how many questions or how many minutes a particular Alloy final will be. The paper is composed server-side per course, and the numbers on the course's public "About the exam" page describe the vendor's certification exam, not Alloy's final — that page says so itself. The count and the clock you see on your own exam page are the ones that apply to you.

  The pass mark

  On all four courses you can enter today, Alloy's own final passes at 72%, and the exam page prints that figure beside the Start button. Alloy grades an attempt as the average of your per-question scores, and the boundary counts as a pass — exactly 72% passes.

  One thing that regularly confuses people: the certification vendors' published "720" is not 72% of the questions. It is a scaled cut score on a 100–1,000 scale, set by a standard-setting study. Alloy encodes it as 0.72 for its own final and applies it as a proportion of your answers, which is Alloy's rule, not the vendor's. Do not read a score on Alloy's final as a prediction of a scaled score on the real exam.

  "Locked" has more than one cause — check which card you are seeing

  This is the important one, and it is where a wrong answer does real damage. A final that will not open is not automatically a statement that you are not ready. There are five cards, and four of them say something other than "study more":

  1. Readiness below the band — the "This opens when your readiness reaches Ready" card, with your band and the remediation above. This one *is* about study. 2. You already passed — "You already passed this final. Your Verified Final Exam Pass is recorded — there is nothing to retake." 3. A cool-off after a failed attempt — a "Cool-off in effect" card. It names the time your next retake unlocks; if it cannot read that time, it says so plainly rather than guessing a date. The cool-off still stands in that case. Cool-off lengths differ per course, so never carry one course's waits over to another. 4. Manual review — "You have used all automatic retakes for this final. Further attempts require manual review — there is no automatic unlock." 5. A failed readiness read — a card headed "We could not read your readiness", which states explicitly that this is *not* a statement that you are not ready and that nothing about your record has changed. It appears when the exam page gets an answer back that is structurally incomplete — no readiness state, or no unlock decision at all. Refreshing is the right first move.

  States 2, 3 and 4 are decided from your recorded attempt history and are checked before readiness is even considered, precisely so nobody who has already passed or is inside a cool-off is told to go and build more coverage. So: read which card is on the screen before advising anyone to study more.

  ⛔ And card 1 is not proof that a learner is under-prepared. When the readiness computation itself fails — the evidence store or the course's readiness policy cannot be read — the system deliberately refuses to open the exam rather than opening it on a bad read, which is the right call. But today that refusal is not presented as card 5. It comes through as the ordinary card 1: readiness "Not ready", with the standard "build coverage and mastery in Practice and Labs" line. A learner hitting a transient outage sees the same screen as a learner who genuinely has not studied.

  So if someone on card 1 says their readiness was higher a moment ago, or that the band dropped suddenly, or that they have clearly covered the course: treat it as a possible failed read, not as a verdict. Ask them to refresh; if it persists, have them report it with the feedback button rather than telling them to study more. Never tell a learner on card 1 that the score is definitely theirs — we cannot tell those two cases apart from the screen.

  Does Alloy proctor its final?

  No. There is no proctoring vendor, no webcam, no identity check and no AI-assist detection on Alloy's final. The only integrity signals are basic browser lifecycle events — page visibility and window focus — which are recorded to the attempt's audit trail. That recording is best-effort and fire-and-forget, and nothing in the system fails, voids or flags an attempt because you switched tabs or left the page. If you get interrupted mid-paper, the clock keeps running, but nothing else happens to your attempt.

  Note that a course's exam page may say the *certification* is proctored — that describes how the vendor delivers its own exam at a test centre or online, and says nothing about how Alloy runs its final.

  If something here does not match what you are seeing

  Send us a screenshot of the card on your exam page. The wording on that card tells us which of the five states you are actually in, and that is the difference between "keep practising" and "this is our problem, not yours".

• Which Alloy courses are open to take right now, and which are waitlist onlyAlloy

  The four courses that are open this round

  Four Alloy courses are open to enter in the current round — the only four available to enter at all this round. Checked on 2026-08-27, these are they, with the address of each:

  • Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F) Exam Prep — /tracks/claude-architect-foundations-prep • Claude Certified Associate - Foundations (CCAO-F) Exam Prep — /tracks/claude-associate-cert-prep • Claude Certified Architect - Professional (CCAR-P) Exam Prep — /tracks/claude-architect-advanced-prep • Claude Certified Developer - Foundations (CCDV-F) Exam Prep — /tracks/claude-developer-cert-prep

  Those are the names and the addresses exactly as they appear in the product. You will find the same four listed on the catalogue at /catalog.

  All four are exam preparation courses that Alloy builds. Alloy is not affiliated with Anthropic, the four exams are Anthropic's and not Alloy's, and taking an Alloy course is not the exam and is not the certification. If a customer asks about that, the fuller answer is the separate support article "Alloy is not affiliated with Anthropic".

  If you are looking at a list somewhere else with more courses on it than these four, that list is not the open list. If it is on an Alloy page, report it with the feedback button so it is logged as a problem.

  The "Coming soon" cards are not open courses

  Further down the catalogue you will see a section headed "Coming soon — join the waitlist". Those cards are real entries, each with a name, a short overview page and a waitlist form — but they are not open to enter this round. They are not hidden from you and they have not been cancelled; they are simply not part of the current round.

  To join a waitlist — to sign up to be told when one of these opens — open the card, which takes you to that subject's overview page at /learn/<name-of-the-track>, and use the waitlist form on that page. Joining a waitlist is how you get told when something opens; it does not enrol you in anything and it does not reserve a place.

  These are among the subjects that appear as waitlist cards rather than as open courses, so please do not tell a customer they can buy or enter any of them today:

  • AI Agents Foundations • AI Evaluation & Reliability • AI for Business Operators • AI Workflow Optimization for Non-Technical Professionals • Context Reliability • Prompting, Context Engineering & Structured Outputs • Topsway — Personal Marketing with AI

  There is also an entry named "How the Alloy Exam Workspace Works". It is not a course — the registry records it as a dashboard rendering fixture — and it is not open, it has no waitlist page, and its track address redirects to /catalog rather than opening anything.

  ⚠️ Do not tell a customer they are imagining that name. The same wording is also used for a platform explainer about the exam workspace the four open courses share, and that explainer is deliberately kept visible. So the honest answer is: *"that is not one of our courses — it is an explainer about how the course workspace works, and there is nothing to enrol in there."* Do not promise them a course behind it, and do not send them a link to it.

  "When does course X open?"

  We do not have a date, and we cannot give one. Nothing that decides what is open carries a launch date, an estimate or a target — there is no date field in the gate registry or on a waitlist entry at all, so there is no date to look up and none to quote. Do not offer "in a few weeks", and do not read a guess out of anything. The honest answer is: *"I do not have a date for that one. Join the waitlist on its page at /learn/<track> and you will be told when it opens."*

  If your old bookmark points at /tracks/cca-foundations

  That link still works. The public address of Claude Certified Architect – Foundations changed on 2026-08-23 from cca-foundations to claude-architect-foundations-prep, and the old address is served a permanent redirect to the new one, so saved links and bookmarks are not broken.

  The course itself is not gone, deleted or retired — only its web address changed. The current address, and the one to quote, is:

  /tracks/claude-architect-foundations-prep

  Being on the open list is not the same as being able to open the course

  This is worth being precise about, because the two get confused.

  • Open list means *visible and not held back for this round* — the course appears on the catalogue and is not behind the round's gate. • Signing in is a separate step. Not everyone who arrives is admitted to the platform in the current round; someone who is not is offered a place on Alloy's platform-access waitlist instead. Being on a waitlist and being admitted are different things. • An access check on the paid material inside a course is a third, separate thing, and it is two checks, not one. Alloy reads your Memriq credit balance — **one shared balance, not a per-course purchase** — and, separately, whether you have taken that course's diagnostic. Either one can leave the paid material closed while the course itself is open. ⛔ Never tell a customer they have to buy that particular course: there is no per-course purchase to make.

  So "this course is open" is true and useful, but it is not a promise that any particular person can start it immediately. If a customer is signed in and still cannot get into one of the four, that is a specific problem worth raising with support rather than a catalogue question.

  Two things support should re-check rather than assume

  • Whether a course is open is a live state, not a fixed property. An Alloy operator can open a course to learners without a new release of the software, so the list above is what was true on 2026-08-27. If a customer says they can see a fifth course, believe them and check before contradicting them — they may be right and the list may have moved. • A failed waitlist join is not proof the track was unknown. The waitlist accepts far more names than the courses listed here, so if a join did not work, please do not tell the customer their course was unrecognised. Take the details and let support check what actually happened.

  What this page does not tell you

  It does not tell you what a course costs, what is free, whether a place is included with a plan, or anything about registering for or paying for the certification exam itself, which is not Alloy's exam. Those are separate questions — ask support and we will answer them properly rather than guess.

• Code Scan — what it costs, and what access Alloy has to your public or private repositoryAlloy

  Code Scan reads a repository you point it at and teaches you from your own code: it looks for places where what you are studying in a course shows up — or is missing — in the files you actually wrote. This page covers the two questions people ask most: what it costs, and what access Alloy has to your repository.

  What it costs, and when you are charged

  You see a price before you press the button. Once you have picked a course, the scan panel shows a quote — the number of credits, how many lessons it is pricing, and the per-lesson rate — and the charge at the end is worked out from that same quote. If we cannot price the scan, the panel says so; it never quietly renders as free, and if you change your selection after the quote was calculated the page tells you the figure on screen is for a different set of lessons and is not the price of the scan you are about to run.

  Read that quote as a ceiling, not as the amount that will come out of your wallet. When the scan finishes, the charge is worked out per lesson the scan actually judged, not per lesson it set out to examine. If it could examine ten lessons but could only reach a verdict on six, you are billed for six. So the quote is the most you can pay, and the final debit is often lower.

  Go by the figure on your own screen, not by a number anyone quotes you. The rate is configuration rather than a fixed constant: it is read fresh each time a scan is priced, so it can be changed without a release. There is also a ceiling on what any single scan can quote, and when that ceiling applies it is shown to you as part of the quote. Support will not quote you a per-lesson rate or a cap from memory — the quote you were shown is the authoritative one, and we will check it against your record if it looks wrong.

  You are charged only on completion. A scan that refuses, fails, times out or that you abandon costs nothing at all. There is no upfront hold and no reservation: nothing is taken when you press start. The charge fires once, at the end, and it is tied to that scan's own id so a retry or a repeated callback cannot bill you twice.

  A completed scan that could judge nothing is free. If the scan ran to the end but no lesson could be judged against your code, the system records "no lesson could be judged — nothing was charged" and no credits move.

  That last point matters for how we answer a very common question. If a scan came back empty, you were not charged — that is different from being refunded. There is nothing to refund here by construction, because there was never a debit to reverse. If your balance looks wrong after an empty or failed scan, report it with the feedback button as a real problem rather than a refund request.

  Two more things worth knowing:

  • If you cannot afford the quote, the scan is refused before it runs — you get a clear "you need more credits" answer rather than a partial scan or a surprise bill. • A billing problem never takes your results away. If the scan finished and the debit itself failed for some reason, the findings are still yours. The scan records that the charge did not go through, and sorting that out is ours to do — never a reason to withhold work that is already done.

  What access Alloy has to your repository

  Public repositories work straight away. Paste the URL — GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Codeberg — and the scan reads what anyone can read.

  Private repositories are different, and this is the part people care about. To *scan* a private repository, Alloy never asks you for a password or a token. There is no box to paste a personal access token into on the scan panel — and if a URL you paste contains a token, we refuse the URL rather than store it.

  Access to a private repository for scanning comes from the Alloy GitHub App. It is installed on GitHub's own page, once per repository, by someone with admin rights on that repository — so it is you if you own the repository, and a teammate otherwise. Whoever installs it chooses exactly which repositories it can see, and it can be revoked in that person's own GitHub settings at any time without asking us and without us having to do anything. When a scan reads a private repository, Alloy mints a short-lived access token on the server — it lives about an hour, is scoped to the repositories that were ticked, is never stored and never reused.

  One place does ask you for a token, and it is not the scan. If you go on to ask Alloy to open a pull request (see below), that panel has a field labelled "Repository token (used once, stored nowhere)", and the submit button stays disabled until you fill it in. That token is held for that single request, is never written to our database, a log line or an error message, and is cleared from the page as soon as the request returns. Scanning never asks for it; only opening a pull request does.

  To be precise rather than reassuring: Alloy does hold its own GitHub App key on the server, which is what lets it mint those short-lived tokens. What Alloy never *stores* is your credential — a pull-request token passes through one request and is kept nowhere afterwards. If someone asks "does Alloy have a standing credential to my repo", the honest answer is: no credential of yours is retained, and the one it does keep is an app installation you or your repository admin control and can remove.

  ⚠️ **Before telling anyone that private-repository scanning will work for them, check that the GitHub App is actually configured in their environment.** The private-repo path only functions where the App credentials are set up, and the whole private-access part of the page is conditioned on that check. The page itself will say which case applies for a given repository — and if it cannot tell, it says it could not check rather than guessing. If the page cannot tell, say so plainly rather than promising it works.

  What a scan does to your code

  A scan reads. It does not change anything. Nothing is committed, merged or pushed as a side effect of scanning.

  Separately, when the scan proposes an improvement, you can ask Alloy to open a pull request for it. That is a deliberate, opt-in action with real limits:

  • We create a new branch and open a pull request against it. We never push to your default branch, never force-push, and never overwrite an existing branch. • The default branch is read from GitHub at the time of the request, and a write is refused if it would land there. • If the branch we would create already exists, we refuse and tell you — we never update, reset or delete a ref. • Merging stays your decision. Alloy opens the pull request; it never merges it.

  And a pull request only happens if you have said so three times: you have to **authorise pull requests for that specific repository** — an authorisation you can withdraw at any time — you have to approve that exact change after reading it, and you have to **supply a repository token with permission to open a pull request**, which is used for that one request and stored nowhere. Having scanned a repository does not authorise writing to it.

  If something does not match what you are seeing

  The figures on your own screen and the line on your credit ledger are the truth. If a quote, a charge, an empty scan, or a repository permission looks wrong to you, tell support what your screen said and we will check the actual record rather than answer from the general rules above.

• Certificates, credentials and certification — what Alloy issuesAlloy

  Does Alloy give me a certificate?

  Alloy does not issue a certificate in the way most people mean the word. There is no PDF, no printable certificate, no image and no digital badge — Alloy generates none of those. What Alloy does have is an in-app credential wallet on your Proof page, and it records three things about your work here.

  The three levels, in order, are:

  1. Course Completion — you finished a course end to end. 2. Verified Final Exam — you passed one of Alloy's own final exams. 3. Verified Skill Evidence — Alloy holds verified evidence that you cover the concepts.

  Each level shows as either Earned or Coming. "Coming" simply means you have not met the conditions for it yet — Alloy never fills in a level you have not earned, and a level shown as Coming has not been issued or awarded to you in any form.

  What each level actually requires

  Course Completion is earned once you have at least one course where every one of its lessons is marked complete. A course with no lessons listed can never satisfy it.

  Verified Final Exam is earned once you have at least one passing attempt at an Alloy final exam. It is recorded the moment your attempt is graded as passed.

  Verified Skill Evidence is earned once Alloy holds at least one skill-evidence record at its top rung (demonstrated-no-help) against a concept. Two different things write a record at that rung: passing an Alloy lab in No-Help mode, and an **external certification of yours that Alloy has confirmed with its issuer**. So this level means "Alloy holds verified evidence covering these concepts" — it is not a statement that you completed an unaided Alloy lab, and support should not describe it that way. If this level is earned but you have not yet passed an Alloy final exam, the wallet shows a note on the card saying the credential currently rests on the skill-evidence side only.

  Is this an Anthropic certification?

  No, and it is important that this is clear. **An Alloy credential is not an Anthropic certification.** It does not count toward one, does not partially satisfy one and is not a substitute for one. Alloy builds preparation courses for those exams; it is not affiliated with Anthropic, and buying a course here is not the exam or the certification.

  The real Claude certifications are issued by Anthropic, delivered through Pearson VUE, and badged via Credly. You book and sit those with Pearson VUE — you cannot schedule them through Alloy, and Alloy has no scheduling or booking step for them anywhere. (The Account screen carries a section headed "Exam scheduling". That copy is ahead of the product; nothing behind it books anything.)

  Alloy's own final exam is also not proctored. There is no proctoring vendor, no webcam and no identity check on it. (If you see the word "proctored" anywhere on the Alloy credential card, that wording is wrong — Alloy proctors nothing. Where a course brief mentions a proctoring requirement, that describes the real vendor exam, not Alloy's practice final.)

  Can someone else verify my Alloy credential from a link?

  No. There is no public verification page for an Alloy credential, and no link you can send that lets a third party look one up. Everything in your wallet sits behind your own sign-in.

  The one thing you can send outward is a portfolio export — a JSON file you copy or download yourself from your Proof page. Alloy does not send it anywhere on your behalf. The export is sectioned and you choose which sections to include, so an export can legitimately contain no credentials at all if you leave that section switched off. Whether a recipient can do anything useful with that file is up to them; Alloy makes no claim about it.

  What does "attested" mean?

  "Attested" is not about Alloy's own assessment of you. It means only that an **outside issuer confirmed an external certification you claimed** — the badge says "confirmed with the issuer outside Alloy".

  To reach that state, Alloy checks the credential at the issuer itself, from a verification URL on a registered issuer host (Credly is the registered issuer today, because that is where Anthropic's certifications are badged). Only a positive confirmation from the issuer's own document earns the attested tag.

  What you hand Alloy is one line of text: **paste the public verification link, or the credential id from your certificate, into the "Add a credential" box**. Alloy then goes and reads the issuer's own record. Alloy will never accept a screenshot or a photo — there is no file picker and no drop zone anywhere in that flow, so please do not send an image expecting it to be recorded. It also never takes a score, pass mark or date you type in yourself; it reads those from the issuer or not at all.

  There are three other outcomes, and none of them is Alloy forming a view about you. If Alloy could not reach or read the issuer's record, the claim stays self-reported — that is neither a pass nor a failure, it just means nothing outside Alloy has vouched for it. If the issuer answered and their record does not currently show the credential, the claim is marked that way; issuer records change and can lag, so if your certificate page shows it, check again here. And if the badge is real but the issuer's record shows it belongs to someone else, that is recorded as its own separate outcome rather than being called fake.

  Does an Alloy credential expire?

  Alloy's wallet records no expiry. It stores the level, whether it is earned, the concepts it covers and, for some levels, a date — there is no expiry, validity period or renewal date on it, and no renewal step to complete.

  That is a statement about Alloy's wallet only. If you are asking about the validity period of an actual Anthropic certification, that is Anthropic's policy and not something Alloy sets — ask support and we will point you at the issuer's own terms rather than guess.

  The short version you can quote

  Alloy gives you an in-app credential wallet with three levels — Course Completion, Verified Final Exam, Verified Skill Evidence — each shown as earned or not earned. It does not give you a PDF, a printable certificate or a badge, there is no public link a third party can verify, and none of it is an Anthropic certification. Those are issued by Anthropic, sat with Pearson VUE, and badged via Credly.

• The AI and agents you can use in Alloy — the Coach, AI grading, interview simulation and Code ScanAlloy

  People ask this in a lot of different ways — "what agents does Alloy have", "is there an AI tutor", "does a bot mark my answers". This is the answer to all of them: the AI-driven things you can use as a learner, what each one does, and where each one deliberately stops.

  Two things to say straight away, because they change how you read the rest:

  • None of these put you in touch with a person. Everything below is software. Where a feature cannot help you, it says so — it does not hand you to a human, and Alloy's own code forbids the Coach from ever promising that it will. • Not everything below is switched on for every account. Two of them are closed unless an operator has opened them. Where that applies it is said plainly, and **your own menu is the authority, not this page.**

  The Coach — a chat about the course you are studying

  The Coach is a chat that answers questions about the course you are in. It is scoped to that course: it knows which track and concept you are on, and it grounds its answers in that course's own indexed material rather than in general knowledge. The header says as much — "Coach · *your course*", with "grounded in curriculum KB · cites sources" underneath it, and the empty chat invites you to "Ask your Coach anything — explain concepts, clarify mistakes, generate drills."

  What you get with an answer:

  • Citations. Claims carry inline concept citations that link into the curriculum, and a "Sources:" footer you can open. • The retrieved material itself. Every retrieval is shown below the chat in a panel you can expand, so you can check where an answer came from rather than take it on trust. • An honest warning when it cited nothing. If an answer came from retrieved material but carries no concept citation, the Coach flags it as uncited rather than letting it pass. • A drill. Once a conversation is under way you can ask the Coach to generate a practice drill from it, which opens as a real practice session.

  What it does when it cannot answer. If it cannot ground a reply in your track's indexed material it refuses, under the heading "No grounded answer available", and tells you why: *"I couldn't ground an answer in this track's indexed material, so I won't guess — a confident wrong answer is worse than none when you're studying for an exam."* It then points you at the lessons and concept pages instead. The same thing happens if it cannot reach the material at all: you get a plain "I can't ground an answer — and I won't guess", never an invented answer and never an error page.

  You can shape how it talks to you. Three settings in the Coach sidebar — Pace, Depth and Style — each with an "Auto (coach decides)" option. Pace runs Fast / Standard / Thorough, Depth runs Concise / Standard / In-depth, Style runs Socratic / Balanced / Comprehensive. These are threaded into the Coach itself, so they change the answers rather than only the appearance.

  Where to find it, and what gates it. The Coach is reached from inside a course — open your course and use its own left-hand menu. Do not go looking for it in the main platform menu: that link is currently registered as hidden, while the Coach pages themselves keep serving, so the course menu is the reliable route. You also have to be signed in, and the Coach sits behind a paid-tier gate — if you are on a free account you will see the tier screen rather than the chat.

  Your practice and exam answers are marked by a model

  When you answer a practice question or a final-exam question, the answer is judged by a model, which returns a correct/incorrect verdict, a score and written feedback on what you got wrong.

  Two things about that are worth knowing:

  • You must rate your confidence before an answer is scored. That is enforced on the server as well as in the screen — an answer submitted without a confidence rating is rejected outright and is never scored. • The calibration part is arithmetic, not judgement. The gap between how confident you said you were and whether you were actually right is computed directly from those two numbers. No model decides whether you are over- or under-confident.

  Your practice session debrief, and "Topics to explore"

  Two smaller AI touches sit inside Practice:

  • The debrief at the end of a session is written for you. While it is being produced the panel says "Coach is analyzing your session… stay on this page a moment", and the block is labelled "Coach debrief". If it cannot be produced, you get a plain note built only from the figures your session actually carries — nothing is estimated into existence. • "Topics to explore" appears beside an answer explanation, with the note "tap to save for a discussion with your Coach". Those pills are pulled out of the explanation for you.

  The rest of Practice is not AI. Which question you get, when it comes back, and the scheduling behind it are computed, not written by a model.

  Labs — your submission is reviewed against the lab's rubric

  Where a course has Labs, a submission is reviewed by a model against that lab's explicit rubric, and you are told specifically what to improve rather than given a bare pass or fail. Labs run in three modes — Full, Minimal and No-Help — and a passing No-Help run is the strongest evidence signal you can produce for yourself.

  ⚠️ Labs is not on every course. Please check your own course menu before assuming you have it; the fuller answer is in Alloy's "what is included in a course" material.

  Interview simulation — real, and closed unless an operator opens it

  Alloy has a multi-turn mock interview scoped to a course's concepts and domains. An AI interviewer opens with a question drawn from the course you pick, follows up on each answer, raises difficulty and challenges shaky claims — and ends with a debrief scored against that course's own exam-blueprint domain weightings, with per-domain scores anchored in quotes from your own answers, explicit strengths and gaps, and in-scope concepts to review. A thin transcript earns a low score with concrete gaps rather than an inflated pass.

  It is a metered action: starting an interview spends credits once for the whole session, and the follow-up turns and the final debrief cost nothing more. A course with no interview material yet is an honest empty state that costs you nothing.

  ⛔ But the Interview route is closed by default. Alloy's gates are closed until an operator opens them, and Interview's is one of them — both the standalone Interview page and the one inside a course. So the safe assumption is that you do not have it. If it is not in your course menu, that is expected rather than a fault. Please do not take this page as a promise that you can open it.

  Code Scan — real, Pro, and closed by default

  Code Scan points at a repository you choose, reads your code against what a course teaches lesson by lesson, and tells you where you already do it right, where you diverge, and how to close the gap. Each finding comes back as a card with a fixed set of slots — Pattern Detected, Assessment, Freshness Signal, Why It Matters, Recommended Improvement, Teach Me, Practice It, Apply It Here and Add to Plan. The reading of your code is model-driven.

  It is a Pro capability, a scan is priced per lesson examined, the price is shown before you start, and you are charged only when a scan completes — never for one that refuses, fails or is abandoned. Alloy has a separate, fuller answer about what Code Scan costs and what access it has to your repository; use that one for those questions.

  ⛔ Like Interview, the Code Scan surface is closed by default and only opens when an operator opens it. If it is not on your menu, it is not available to you.

  What is deliberately not AI

  Worth knowing, because people assume the opposite:

  • Which question you get next, and when. Selection and spacing are computed. • The thinking-pause question inside a podcast episode. Your choice is checked against the stored answer for that question. Nothing is being judged by a model there. • An Alloy Report on your Proof page. A report is a faithful projection of a lab review that already happened — no model runs when one is generated.

  If you asked about "agents" and meant how Alloy is built

  That is a different question from this one, and it is not something support answers. What Alloy publishes about its own organisation — who runs it, what the team is — is a fact about the company, not a feature you can use, and quoting it back at somebody asking what AI they can use in the product would be answering the wrong question.

  We also will not tell you which model sits behind any of the above, or describe Alloy's internal architecture. If what you actually want is help with a course, ask the Coach inside that course; if you want to know what your account can open, your own menu is the answer.