Four levers and a brake that pulls itself.
A daily budget that switches the paid stages off when it is reached. And a page that shows what each kind of processing actually costs.
What you can do with it
- Set a daily budget: once it is reached, classification, fact extraction, fact-check and deep research switch themselves off — until midnight UTC. The reason is recorded on the job.
- Bound the automatic stages' time window so a backlog after an outage is not worked through in one go.
- Switch off paid web search in the fact-check — it is off by default.
- Cap the output length per search and research run.
- Look up what a piece of processing costs: per workflow, over 1, 7, 30 or 90 days — classification and rewriting averaged per story, fact-check per paragraph, rule generation per rule produced.
The thinking behind it
On 4 September 2026, three hours cost $21.25. Fact-check and deep research were working through a backlog after an outage — one paid web search per story each. $14.58 of that was those searches alone; the rest was tokens with no length limit.
That turned into four levers, all adjustable in one place. And a brake that does not wait for someone to look: before every batch, the paid stages query today's running total.
What mattered was that the brake holds: when the budget is reached, automatic operation is switched off in the stored settings too — otherwise the next restart would start it up again.
$14.58 of $21.25 were web searches. For stories that were being searched anyway.
Improvements
Daily budget with self-shutdown
When today's cost reaches the budget, the paid stages end their run and switch automatic operation off. At 00:00 UTC the block lifts by itself.
Four levers in one place
Time window from 14 days to 2, web search in the fact-check switchable and off by default, an extra news-value step at 90 (without it the frugal setting was not selectable at all), and a cap on output length.
Give feedback or ask a question
Missing something, bothered by something, unsure about something? Write it down here — it goes straight to the people working on this feature.