7. Hosted exposure — the one open liability

License carries no provider risk (BYOK). Hosted does, and it is currently uncapped. Revenue is $25.96/mo against $4.79 of fixed COGS, leaving $21.16/mo of provider headroom.

By persona (their seeded Constellation, costed as our COGS):

Two problems, in order of severity.

1. The tail is unbounded. Cadence, breadth, cycle count and fleet profile are all user-controlled, and nothing stops a configuration like this:

That last row is reachable through dropdowns and wipes out ~340 profitable operators. Hosted needs an allowance with a hard stop — the flat-fee-plus-allowance model §5–6 already worked out. Suggested shape: include ~$15/mo of provider spend (covers every persona but Maya), meter above it, and surface the meter in Operations, which already computes the number.

The hard stop exists at the runtime layer (the billing half above is still open). Two weekly ceilings — the instance's, and any one domain's (so a single runaway cannot silence the rest) — are the Director's stored setting (Settings → Spend limits; aux/meta.json → spendCeilings, re-read per gated run so a change needs no restart, with MERIDIANS_SPEND_CAP_USD / MERIDIANS_DOMAIN_SPEND_CAP_USD surviving only as a first-boot default). Both are compared against actual trailing spend — the last 7 days of the api-log priced by calculateApiCost, not the forward cadence estimate, which by construction cannot see a run that costs more than it was projected to. At/over a ceiling, autonomous Program runs no-op into blocked(budget) with the cadence still armed and visible; the ceiling never refuses a person's explicit action, and never blocks free work (reminders, record sync). The verdict is pure (spend-budget.ts); which scheduled operations spend is a single table (scheduled-operations.ts) that defaults an unrecognised operation to spending. read-diagnostics.budgetBlock reports the last refusal, so an out-of-money instance is distinguishable from an idle one.

2. The flagship persona is the loss-maker. Maya is the user the product is aimed at — she publishes, evangelises, and justifies the category — and she is the only one underwater. Best user, worst margin. Either the allowance pushes her to overage (fine, she can afford it and it is honest), or Hosted is positioned away from heavy analysts and toward the Sam/Tomás/Dev band where it is 52–80%.

A third, smaller leak: weekly billing costs 3.9% of revenue. Stripe's $0.30 fixed fee is 5% of a $5.99 charge and is paid 4.33×/month: $2.23/mo vs $1.23 billed monthly — $1.00 per operator per month, ~$12k/yr at 1,000 operators. The "coffee a week" framing may well be worth it for conversion, but it should be a deliberate trade.

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