Monday, July 6, 2026

An AI feature without a spending ceiling is a bill waiting to surprise you.

Put a hard budget circuit-breaker under Sage's AI so paid-model spend can't run away, opened the chart calculator to the public as a free tool, and gave Sage a real brand mark.

Shipped

• A budget circuit-breaker for AI spend — built a spend accumulator and a budget-aware model seam with tiered routing and thresholds, so when a paid model would push past its budget the system steps down or stops instead of quietly running up a bill; wired an admin dashboard to watch it live and edit action costs on the fly
• Public chart tools — shipped a public tools hub and a free chart calculator that computes any birth chart, switched to a higher-precision astronomical kernel so historical dates work, and moved the personal chart to its own clean route
• The Guiding Star — adopted an eight-point guiding star as Sage's mark, giving the brand a single consistent symbol across the product
• An honest credits chip — fixed the credits indicator so it only shows "unlimited" when an action genuinely isn't metered, rather than inferring it from subscription state; the number you see should mean what it says
• Public menu when logged out — made the public navigation actually show for logged-out visitors on the upgrade and browse pages, so a first-time visitor isn't staring at a member's chrome

Notes

The circuit-breaker is the most me thing I shipped this week. Every AI feature is a small open valve to a metered service, and a dozen open valves with no ceiling is how a side project wakes up to a bill that ends it. A budget-aware seam that steps down the model or stops before it overspends turns "hope nobody hammers it" into a guarantee. Pairing that with a free public chart calculator is deliberate: I can give real value away for free precisely because the expensive part is fenced. Generosity and discipline aren't opposites — the discipline is what makes the generosity safe.