3e. Real portfolios are lopsided — and that changes the answer
From the Meridians Wiki · Public · Maintained · joint
Everything above prices a uniform constellation. Real ones aren't: a Director runs one or two hot
Domains on a fast beat, several slow ones on weekly, and a Private Domain that crawls nothing.
portfolioWeeklySpend costs each member at its own cycles, cadence, and breadth.
A realistic lopsided 6-Domain constellation (1 hourly/broad, 2 daily, 2 weekly, 1 private):
| Member | $/wk | Share | Articles/wk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supply — Fabs (hourly, broad, 4 terms) | $8.64 | 74.1% | 5,600 |
| Demand — Compute (daily) | $0.99 | 8.5% | 400 |
| Silicon Competition (daily) | $0.84 | 7.2% | 300 |
| Policy — Export (weekly) | $0.42 | 3.6% | 30 |
| Power buildout (weekly) | $0.42 | 3.6% | 30 |
| My Strategy (private, no crawl) | $0.34 | 2.9% | 0 |
| Total | $11.66 | 6,360 |
One member is three-quarters of the bill. And the same six Domains cost $5.04/wk uniform vs $11.66/wk lopsided — a 2.3× spread from shape alone. So:
Domain count is a poor cost predictor. The distribution of cadence × breadth across members is the whole story. Any per-seat pricing or in-product estimate that reasons from "how many domains" will misprice by >2× in both directions.
The product consequence is that the Operations surface should lead with concentration — "one loop is 74% of your spend" — rather than a portfolio average. That single sentence is more actionable than any total, and it points at the one lever worth pulling.
The Firecrawl plan cliff — and it lands on the default constellation size
Credits are bought in monthly blocks, so cost steps rather than slopes:
| Domains (uniform default) | $/wk | Credits/mo | Plan needed | Plan $/mo | Utilisation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0.85 | 1,560 | Hobby | $16 | 31% |
| 3 | $2.52 | 4,680 | Hobby | $16 | 94% ⚠️ |
| 6 | $5.04 | 9,360 | Standard | $83 | 9% |
| 10 | $8.39 | 15,600 | Standard | $83 | 16% |
| 20 | $16.78 | 31,200 | Standard | $83 | 31% |
A default 3-Domain constellation sits at 94% of the Hobby allowance. The fourth Domain — or one step from steady to broad — forces Standard: $16 → $83/mo, a 5× jump for a ~33% workload increase. That cliff lands exactly on the shape onboarding produces by default, which makes it a product problem, not a footnote:
- Warn before the step, in the breadth/cadence picker — "this widens you past the Hobby allowance" — since the marginal Domain looks cheap ($0.84/wk) while actually costing $67/mo in plan step.
- Beyond the step there is enormous headroom. Standard covers 20+ Domains at 31% utilisation, so the honest advice above 4 Domains is "grow freely, you've already paid for it."
- Self-hosting Firecrawl (AGPL) removes the ladder entirely and is the right answer for a heavy Director.