Your $20 Subscription Meets a Paywall at 11:47 AM
Token limits, context rot, compaction cliffs and the productivity math vendors keep postponing.
Nine instruments for developers, SREs and CTOs. Token bills, error budgets, HPA sizing, sampling fits, pool sizing and downtime cost, all runnable in seconds. Everything runs in your browser with no data sent. Each links to its teardown.
Jump to Token Bill · RPS Envelope · Compaction · Retry Storm · Error Budget · HPA Sizer · Sampling Fit · Pool Sizer · Downtime Cost. Built from the Cursor token, Replit retry, Razorpay Kafka and AWS thermal teardowns.
Price one agent turn from context mix, then scale to a month. Starts from a heavy agent session: 80k input tokens at 87.5 percent cache hits plus 1.5k output tokens.
Token limits, context rot, compaction cliffs and the productivity math vendors keep postponing.
Turn events per second into a monthly envelope: edge rate times seconds per month at a blended price, plus fixed platform spend.
Sandbox execution, agent retries and the cost of prompt-to-production infrastructure.
A context window goes in, a summary comes out. See what survives and what the re-read bill looks like. Defaults mirror the measured median: 575k crushed to about 4.3k, then roughly 28 steps of re-reading.
Token limits, context rot, compaction cliffs and the productivity math vendors keep postponing.
Failed agent attempts rebill every retry. Multiply tasks by retries by attempt cost and watch the storm's share of the budget.
Sandbox execution, agent retries and the cost of prompt-to-production infrastructure.
Turn an SLO into minutes. A 99.9 percent objective leaves 43.2 minutes a month. Enter what is already burned plus the current burn multiple to see when the budget runs dry.
Four frontier providers dark in one window, and the shared layer beneath them.
The real Kubernetes autoscaler formula. Desired replicas equal current replicas times current utilization over target utilization, rounded up. Defaults scale 8 replicas at 72 percent toward a 60 percent target.
Regional isolation, failure containment and zero-blast-radius control planes.
Spans per second times bytes per span is your daily ingest. Price it, then compute the keep rate that fits the budget. Defaults ingest 50k spans a second at 2 KB against a $20k monthly budget.
Shards, CDC, vector search and the modeled bill of a 200-billion-block platform.
Little's law for pools. Concurrent connections equal peak RPS times p99 latency in seconds, times a safety factor, spread across pods. Defaults mirror a 10k TPS payments switch at 45ms p99.
Partitions, connectors and the IAM cap that ended the surge before it started.
Minutes down times revenue per minute, plus the SLA credit on the cloud bill. Assumes a 43,800-minute month. Defaults model a four-hour outage against $4M monthly revenue at risk.
Cooling died, power followed, and snapshots became the recovery plan.