ArcPlanner Go started life as the simplest thing we make: a free iPhone calculator for media math. CPM to impressions, budget to reach, pacing against a flight — the arithmetic every plan runs on. Version 1.4, rolling out on the App Store now, adds something calculators don't usually have: a complete advertising course. Thirty lessons across six modules, from what a media budget actually buys to how to scale a campaign without watching it decay.
The number was never the hard part
Watch how people actually use a media calculator and you see two audiences. Professionals use it to sanity-check numbers they already understand. Everyone else — the founder buying a first campaign, the marketer who just inherited a budget, the student — uses it to produce a number they then have to defend in a meeting. The tool always gave them the number. It never gave them the judgment: whether the frequency is too high, whether the mix makes sense, whether the plan can fail in a way anyone would notice. That gap is what 1.4 is aimed at.
The calculator produces the answer. The course exists so you can defend it.
Learning where the work happens
We deliberately didn't bolt a content library onto a tool. Every lesson ends in the tool it teaches: the budgeting lesson hands you to the calculator, the allocation lesson opens Quick Plan, the measurement module points at live benchmarks. It works in reverse too — Quick Plan reads the plan you're building and recommends the lesson that explains the tradeoff you're about to make. If your channel mix is doing something questionable, the course shows up in context, not as homework.
Reviewing your own curriculum is humbling
Before shipping we ran the whole curriculum through an adversarial review — every claim checked against the app's actual benchmark data, every lesson read against every other lesson. It found things we're glad shipped fixed rather than live. One lesson praised retargeting as display's best job; eight lessons later, the measurement module explained why retargeting is often the least incremental line in a plan. Both defensible — but nothing connected them, so the course quietly disagreed with itself. One lesson promised a feature the app doesn't have. One "break-even rule" was mathematically wrong. The uncomfortable takeaway: content that teaches a product has to be reviewed against the product, the way code is reviewed against tests. Taste isn't enough.
The same pass went through all seven languages. It caught a glossary entry defining behavioral targeting as targeting from "inferred" actions — the actions are observed; that's the entire distinction — and a Chinese definition of linear TV that technically read as "radio or cable." Native speakers notice. The definitions are now the kind you could read aloud in a client meeting in Tokyo or São Paulo.
What's actually in 1.4
Thirty lessons across six modules — foundations, audience, channels, plan-building, measurement, optimization — about four and a half hours of material with knowledge checks throughout. A hundred-term field guide organized by theme, searchable in every language. A capstone that turns the course into a real, shareable media brief. Full iPad support, opt-in Live Activity pacing on the Lock Screen, and the whole thing localized in seven languages. It stays free: no ads, no purchases, no upsell inside the app.
A calculator that teaches is an odd product, but it follows from something we believe about this industry: most bad media plans aren't arithmetic errors. They're judgment errors executed with perfect arithmetic. The math was always the easy part — so we shipped the other part.
Notes from the build
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