Two Dollars a Day to Brief a Nation
I'm going to tell you what the Citizen's Daily Brief costs to run, because the number is small enough to be surprising and because the surprising part isn't the number. It's what the number does and doesn't tell you about how hard the thing was to build. The Bill LLM inference: about $60 a month. This is the only line that isn't free, and nearly all of it is the daily pipeline: about $2 per run…
The daily Citizen's Brief costs approximately $2 to produce, which amounts to around $60 per month. This low cost is primarily due to the efficient utilization of AI models. The daily pipeline, which runs on GitHub Actions, takes approximately 20 minutes to complete, with most of the time spent waiting for the model to generate responses.
Six runs are conducted weekly, plus an additional weekly pass, totaling about 600 minutes per month, well within the free allowance of the AI services. The system also relies on free tiers from GitHub Actions, Supabase for database storage, and Netlify for web hosting. The main expenses are the daily inference run on Claude Sonnet and the weekly assessment run on Claude Opus.
Claude Sonnet, being a cheaper tier, handles the majority of the tasks, while Claude Opus, which is slower and more expensive, is reserved for the more complex weekly assessment. This cost-saving strategy is not solely focused on minimizing expenses, but rather on ensuring the credibility and quality of the brief. The system's architecture is designed to right-size the AI models to the workload, using the cheapest tier for high-volume, constrained tasks and the more expensive tier for the rare, yet crucial, weekly assessment.
The real cost of the brief lies in the time and effort spent on learning how to effectively query the AI models and filtering out invalid responses to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the final product.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
