Cost — quoted before it starts, attributable after it lands.
A fleet whose spend nobody can attribute is estimated, not accounted. In Saphan Studio the cost ledger is part of the same durable record as gates and runs — not a bolt-on analytics product — so money answers to the same questions as evidence.
How money stays accountable
Quoted before it starts
A dispatch does not compose without a cost estimate — there is no path to a run nobody priced. A hard cap is derived from the quote by one stated rule; if a declared cap and the derived one disagree, composition is refused with both figures shown.
Actuals land next to quotes
Every actual is booked beside its quote, with the drift between them, in the same record that holds the gate decisions. So spend is attributable to decisions — not “what did the agents cost last month”, but “what did this merged change cost against its quote, and who approved it, at which gate”.
Born tagged
Every cost row carries its workstream, change, project, person, role, model, vendor, and billing class from the moment it is written — and the axes compose into questions nobody pre-built a report for. Coordination is metered too: the sessions that dispatch and review work are booked like the work itself, because a fleet whose management overhead is invisible is estimated, not accounted.
Billing worlds kept apart
Subscription-covered seats, metered vendor APIs, and local machines running on your own electricity are different billing worlds. Each row carries its class, normalized into one comparable column — and unknown is a first-class answer: a run the system cannot price is surfaced and counted, never blended in as zero. A genuine zero is a human declaration, pinned on the row.
The model that booked is the model that ran
The model is an explicit input on every dispatch; silent substitution and silent session resumption are both refused. A per-model cost report is only meaningful if this holds — so the system makes it hold.
A cost ladder, not a bill
Deterministic commands at zero token cost, local models at your electricity bill, subscription seats at their flat rate, frontier models where the work earns them. A step routed as deterministic that asks for a model is refused outright — and the refusal itself lands in the ledger, at near-zero cost, with its reason.
Quotes calibrate from your own record
Estimates derive from what your work actually cost, never from a vendor’s price list — every quoted/actual pair feeds the calibration, and the honest metric is the trend in your own books. We never count savings against a hypothetical world without the method; that is fortune-telling.
The biggest lever is planning
A defect caught in the brief costs a re-read. The same defect caught in implementation costs an executor run, a review round, and a re-dispatch. The record makes that difference visible per stream — which is why the cheapest optimization in the whole system is a better order, not a cheaper model.
Honestly, as always: caps are enforced per run today. Budget envelopes above the run — per stream, per period — are designed and on the roadmap, and this page will call them shipped when they ship, not one release before.
More of Saphan Studio
Controls — what is in place, control by control →Governance — decisions on the record →Enterprise — the auditor’s view →Bench — measure your own hardware →
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