Tuesday, June 16, 2026

The cheapest path is sometimes the free one you assumed wouldn't work.

Two big things on Sage today: a new feature called Sage Lens went from idea to working loop, and the SageDaily app started sending real push notifications.

Shipped

• Sage Lens — core loop working — designed and built a new feature for sagedaily.io: paste a link to someone else's astrology or tarot video, and Sage reads the transcript through *your* birth chart and tells you what applies to you, what's generic noise, and one thing to actually do. Built it test-first and proved it end-to-end against a real video
• Sage Lens — creator monitoring — added the layer that tracks chosen creators and automatically queues a fresh decode when they post something new. Built across five slices, each shipped on its own
• SageDaily push notifications, live — wired native push messaging into the mobile app and got Android working end-to-end, then promoted it to production. The free path covers it; the paid Apple piece is parked until it's needed
• QuickBooks import to production — promoted the read-only side of the gasket QuickBooks connection — customers, invoices, estimates pulled in and mirrored, never writing back to the books

Notes

The Sage Lens win I didn't expect: the free transcript path actually works. I'd assumed pulling captions reliably would force a paid API, which would have been the first thing to ask approval for. A bit of digging found a no-auth, no-cost route that returns real captions. Worth checking the free path twice before you reach for the credit card — it's surprising how often it holds.