MeridiansMeridians

TL;DR

From the Meridians Wiki · Public · Maintained · joint

  1. Two variable lines move the margin: inference and research. Infra ($2–6/mo), Telegram delivery (free), embeddings (cents), images ($0.04/img) all round to noise. The lines that matter are LLM tokens (heavy creative) and the research-loop portfolio (Firecrawl + interpret), which on a living-domain seat ($2.86/mo) is the single largest variable cost — and it compounds with every topic, site, and cadence the user adds (§3b).
  2. Two findings from the code that change the picture vs. the manifesto:
    • The performance tier IS routed now. Under the shipped balanced-smart profile, generate → performance (Gemini 3.6 Flash, $7.50/1M out) — the one category that leaves the balanced tier. (This corrects an earlier note here claiming PERFORMANCE_MODEL was assigned to no role; that was true of the old role-constant routing, not of modelFor(category) under profiles.) Arc generation is the only call that reaches it, and it is one batched call per merge, so the premium tier lands on ~15% of a domain's weekly spend rather than dominating it (§3d).
    • Output is what costs. Output bills 5–8× input ($2.50 vs $0.30 on balanced; $7.50 vs $1.50 on performance). Reading 465k tokens of articles a week costs ~$0.14; generating 27k tokens of scenes costs ~$0.08. The summarisation hierarchy keeps the read side cheap — the spend is on the write side.
  3. Almost every single action costs pennies. A scene's prose is ~$0.007 COGS; a full 4-scene arc ~$0.005–0.03; a research tick $0.05 (crawl-dominated). The expensive sleepers are TTS narration ($0.10/scene) and Firecrawl at scale.
  4. The model (chosen): a flat $20/seat that includes a generous inference allowance (~15M tokens), with usage-based billing on top. The buyer sees one number; ~80% never touch the meter. Heavy users pay for what they pull and become more profitable (heavy-creative seat: 50% margin billed vs 19% if we ate it), instead of forcing a throttle or a price hike on everyone. Self-host (BYO key) skips the meter. The metering plumbing already exists (calculateApiCost, the GasMeter pill) — what's left is an allowance accumulator
    • Stripe usage billing.

Reframing — 2026-09-20. The Program crawl model remains valid for Directors who ground worlds in live evidence. The modal cost for simulation-shaped users is now generation plus Meridians World Search (MWS): situation intake, world construction, forked arms, readings, and debrief. The crawl model is not discarded; it is no longer the primary cost unit for the participant, reader, learner, or author.