3c. Onboarding — the one-time cost of building a Constellation

# 3c. Onboarding — the one-time cost of building a Constellation

Grounding a Public Domain runs **three saturating search passes** (`onboardingResearchQueryPasses`) at
`limit: 12`, deduped to 30 kept sources, then one corpus synthesis, then chunked extraction (~1 `extract`
call per default-grain chunk — 750 words). Private Domains skip the crawler entirely.

**A 4-domain constellation (3 public, 1 private, 6 topics, 5k-word corpora) on `balanced-smart`:**

| Line | $ |
|---|---|
| Extract corpus → Domain (28 chunks) | $0.174 |
| Synthesise the corpus (4×) | $0.119 |
| Firecrawl grounding (144 cr) | $0.095 |
| Architecture + graph + all suggest calls | $0.016 |
| OpenRouter fee + embeddings | $0.018 |
| **Total (52 LLM calls)** | **$0.421** |

| Constellation size | One-time $ | Calls | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 domain | $0.123 | 17 | 48 |
| 3 domains | $0.311 | 40 | 96 |
| 5 domains | $0.532 | 65 | 192 |
| 8 domains | $0.831 | 101 | 288 |

**The finding: onboarding is not the cost driver.** Building an 8-domain constellation costs less than
*one week* of running a 3-domain one. Onboarding friction can never be justified on cost grounds — and
a free-trial activation is cheap to give away.

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