Freezes are earned, not sold

The streak engine forgives a bad week two ways: earned freezes, and a monthly repair for the week they can’t cover. Both exist so that one week — a flu, a move, a work deadline that ate every evening — doesn’t erase a streak that took months to build. Neither one is for sale.

Why that distinction matters

A freeze you can buy is a freeze that measures your willingness to pay, not your consistency. It changes what the streak next to your name means: is it telling you this person shows up, or that this person had a card on file the week they didn’t? Once one freeze in the count could have come from either place, the whole number stops saying anything reliable.

Freezes that are earned by keeping weeks in the first place don’t have that problem. They’re a record of the exact thing they’re being spent to protect — consistency buying you a small amount of slack on consistency, never bought outright by anything else.

Why they’re capped

An uncapped supply of freezes just moves the cliff instead of removing it: now it takes months of unbroken weeks to run out, instead of one bad week, but the ending is the same shape. A freeze is worth having because it’s scarce enough to matter and small enough that stacking them isn’t a strategy for skipping training altogether. It’s a shock absorber, not a replacement for showing up.

The repair is the same idea, later

Once a week is already missed and no freeze covers it, the repair exists for exactly one month afterward — a second, smaller chance to make a bad week not count against the streak, rather than a permanent open door back to any week that ever slipped. Past that window, the week stands as missed and the streak reflects it. That’s not punitive; it’s just honest about what a streak is supposed to represent once the grace period for representing it otherwise has passed.