Tuesday, June 30, 2026

If a feature costs real money to run, the price should be visible, not hidden.

Put an honest economy under Sage: every AI action now costs a metered credit, with a welcome grant, a monthly reset, and a real price on the paid tier. Also gave builddaily.io a proper front page and stopped my deploys from re-uploading files that never changed.

Shipped

• Moons — a metered credit economy for Sage — built the ledger, cost config, and meter core, then wired every AI action (asking, spreads, chat, decoding a reading) onto it. New members get a welcome grant, balances reset monthly with a daily trickle, and running out shows a clear upgrade nudge instead of a silent failure
• v3 pricing on Sage — set the paid tier at a real number, with an all-AI Plus plan and a free taste, so the value exchange is legible instead of vague
• builddaily.io front page — shipped a dense, front-page index board — a scannable wall of the actual work, in the spirit of a good link aggregator, so the site opens onto what I've built instead of a marketing slab
• Decodes are on-demand only — retired the always-on auto-queue on Sage; a reading gets decoded when someone actually asks for it, not speculatively, which keeps the cost tied to real demand
• Stopped re-uploading unchanged files — fixed the deploy across three sites so it only ships files that actually changed, instead of re-uploading everything every time; faster deploys, and I can trust the diff

Notes

I've been allergic to charging for things, but running AI features costs real money on every call, and pretending otherwise just means the cost hides somewhere until it hurts. Moons make the exchange honest in both directions: the member sees exactly what an action costs and what they have left, and I see demand tied to spend instead of a runaway background process quietly burning compute. Tying decodes to real requests instead of speculative pre-work is the same instinct — spend where there's actually a person on the other end.