1. Services & real 2026 costs (mapped to env vars)
From the Meridians Wiki · Public · Maintained · joint
Every external dependency, the env var that turns it on, what it's used for, and the sourced 2026 price.
| Service | Env var | Role in the engine | 2026 price (sourced) | Who pays (managed / self-host) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter | OPENROUTER_API_KEY | All LLM calls (generation, reasoning, extraction, chat) | DeepSeek v4 Flash $0.14/$0.28, Gemini 2.5 Flash $0.30/$2.50, Gemini 3.6 Flash $1.50/$7.50 per 1M in/out (per MODEL_PRICING) | we provide / BYO key |
| OpenAI — embeddings | OPENAI_API_KEY | text-embedding-3-small, semantic search | $0.02/1M tokens ($0.01 batch) | we provide / BYO key |
| OpenAI — TTS | OPENAI_API_KEY | tts-1 audiobook narration | $15/1M chars (tts-1) · $30 (tts-1-hd) · ~$0.015/min (gpt-4o-mini-tts) | we provide / BYO key |
| Replicate | REPLICATE_API_TOKEN | Seedream 4.x images (board art, covers) | ~$0.03/image (Seedream 4; 4.5 ~$0.035–0.045). App hardcodes $0.04 in calculateApiCost. | we provide / BYO key |
| Firecrawl | FIRECRAWL_API_KEY | Source crawl + change-tracking (research loops) | 1 credit/page; cost/page $0.0006–0.0032 by plan; Search 2cr/10 results; JSON mode +4cr. $0 self-host (AGPL). | we provide / BYO or OSS |
| Fly.io | FLY_API_TOKEN, FLY_ORG, FLY_REGION | Per-tenant VM (managed runtime) | shared-cpu-1x 1024MB ~$5.77/mo always-on ($2.02 base 256MB + 768MB @ ~$5/GB/mo; per-second, scale-to-zero); volume $0.15/GB/mo | we run / n/a (own machine) |
| ngrok | NGROK_AUTH_TOKEN, TUNNEL_TARGET_PORT | Self-host stable tunnel URL | Free (no reserved) · Personal $8/mo ($5 annual), +$14/extra reserved domain | n/a (Fly URL) / ~$8/mo |
| Telegram Bot API | (gateway) | Delivery — the push channel | Free — official Bot API, built for bots: no per-message fee, no templates, no 24h window, no number pool | one bot, both runtimes (managed + self-host) |
| Supabase | NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL, ..._PUBLISHABLE_KEY, SUPABASE_SECRET_KEY | Control plane only — auth, catalog, cron (gateway mode) | Pro $25/mo (amortizes to cents/user) | we run / n/a |
| Vercel | (deploy) | Control-plane hosting | ~$20/mo team, amortized | we run / n/a |
| Stripe | (gateway) | Billing | 2.9% + $0.30 + 0.7% Billing | we run / n/a (self-host free) |
Gateway-only vars (
MERIDIANS_GATEWAY, Supabase, Fly, Stripe) live exclusively on themeridians.globalcontrol plane (Roadmap 2). The per-tenant app and self-host binary never touch them.
The two fees hiding in the inference line
- OpenRouter charges no inference markup — you pay the underlying provider's rate. But it takes a 5.5% credit-purchase fee ($0.80 minimum) on every top-up, plus a 5% BYOK fee on requests above 1M/mo. The model folds the 5.5% into every managed LLM line (we buy OpenRouter credits); small top-ups effectively pay more because of the $0.80 floor.
- Firecrawl is credit-metered, and the per-page rate falls steeply with plan. This is the input most worth picking deliberately:
| Plan | $/mo | Credits | $/page | Search | JSON mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | — | 2cr/10 results | +4cr |
| Hobby | $16 | 5,000 | $0.0032 | " | " |
| Standard | $83 | 100,000 | $0.00083 | " | " |
| Growth (model default) | $333 | 500,000 | $0.00066 | " | " |
| Scale | $599 | 1,000,000 | $0.0006 | " | " |
| Self-host (AGPL) | $0 | ∞ | $0 | — | — |
A research tick crawling 30 pages costs $0.0198 on Growth but $0.096 on Hobby — a 5× difference on the same work, which is why the plan is a first-class input in the model.
Firecrawl spend is loop-driven and compounds — it is not a flat "tick". The real driver is the user's
portfolio of research loops, each with its own mode, topics, sites, and cadence (see §3b). Per the engine
(lib/engine/research): a monitor loop issues one scrape per site; a discover/track loop issues one
search per topic (sites only scope a track search), and each search result is scraped. So cost scales with
topics × results × cadence × number of loops — adding a daily 3-topic discover loop costs ~7× a weekly one.
Price reconciliation note: the manifesto cites DeepSeek at $0.09/$0.18 and Replicate at $0.04; the shipped
MODEL_PRICING / calculateApiCost use $0.14/$0.28 and $0.04. Replicate's list price has since
dropped to ~$0.03. This doc uses the code values for COGS math (they are what the meter charges) and flags the
manifesto as slightly stale.