Cliffwatch
A continuous ACA-subsidy-cliff monitor for self-employed and small-business owners: it watches projected annual income against the 400% federal-poverty-level threshold and surfaces the moves that keep a household under it before the year closes.
A self-employed owner has a good year, crosses the 400% federal-poverty-level line by a few thousand dollars, and discovers at tax time that they owe back every dollar of marketplace subsidy they received — a documented case put the bill at roughly $48,000. The income that triggered it was knowable months earlier, while there was still room to defer it into a retirement account or shift the timing of an expense. By the time annual tax software sees the number, every mitigation window has already closed.
The self-employed founder or small-business owner on a marketplace (ACA) plan whose income lands near the 400% FPL threshold — someone with variable annual income who personally eats the subsidy clawback and has no existing tool that watches the line for them.
The subsidy cliff's return on January 1, 2026 is confirmed by multiple independent sources — a concrete, dated, recent regulation signal.
A bookkeeping connection plus a quarterly projection makes the whole thing self-serve at near-zero marginal cost per added customer.
One cross-reference, one inbound, run-050 cluster membership, and no multi-run echo — a single-cluster idea rather than a converged one.
The temporal window is the standout: the subsidy cliff genuinely did not exist from 2021 through 2025 under enhanced ARPA/IRA subsidies and returned on January 1, 2026 — a confirmed-strength, dated, recent regulation trigger. That window plus a near-zero-marginal-cost self-serve model and a quantified $48K downside for a buyer with no alternative at any price is why it scored as well as it did.
Convergence is thin (one cross-reference, one inbound, single-run cluster, no multi-run echo) and the product is narrow. The buyer is situation-defined rather than a job title, and the whole thing rests on a single regulation that could be legislated away again — concentration risk the score reflects.
Genesis doesn't invent in isolation — Cliffwatch shares architecture with, or powers, these ideas.
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