what does a round cost?
the whole round, against a ceiling of $3.50 printed before it started
the software is free and it stays that way
There is no seat, no account and no invoice from here. The library is MIT licensed, you bring your own key, and the tokens are billed to you by the model provider at their own rates. Nothing is taken on top.
That is a measurement decision before it is a commercial one. When the tool pays for the quota, every rival in a round is pushed towards a single draw, and at one draw the model rerolling and the question set moving cannot be told apart. Letting the token bill go straight to the person who wants the number is what makes depth affordable at all.
what a round actually cost
One paid round of twenty questions, four draws each, on 4 August 2026, came to $2.46 against a ceiling of $3.50 printed before it started. A smaller round on this disk, twenty four answers with no search tool attached, priced out at $0.045760, which is $0.001907 a call.
lulu usage # what the recorded rounds cost, from the provider's own figures
Three bases are kept apart and never merged: an amount the provider stated, a cost computed from tokens it reported, and a floor for calls it said nothing about. Failed calls are counted and priced at nothing, because no response says whether a rejected call is billed.
the ceiling is checked before each call, not after the round
A budget that is reconciled at the end is a receipt. This one is a gate: the price of the next call is computed and checked against what is left, and a round that would cross the line stops short, says so, and exits with a code of its own that is neither success nor failure. The file on disk is then a real round that is shorter than the design that bought it, so every interval computed from it is wider than the one you planned, and a caller that read it as complete would publish the wider bound as the planned one.