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Growzo · Cost control

A hard stop, not a usage dashboard.

Growzo checks every LLM call, every SERP call and every engine probe against a runtime money cap before the call happens, and meters it in paise afterwards. A soft alert fires at 80 percent of the cap and the hard stop lands at 100, where the request is refused rather than sent. These are caps on what you pay your own vendors under a self-hosted, bring-your-own-key install — Growzo is open source and this is not a subscription price.
A spend request passes a budget check before it happens: under the cap the call runs and is metered into a paise ledger, at one hundred percent it is refused and nothing is sent, with a soft alert at eighty percent and the hard stop at one hundred.
The check sits before the request, not after the invoice. That ordering is the whole product.
01 · The mechanism

A dashboard is a receipt. This is a refusal.

Almost every AI tool bills after the fact and shows you a chart. That chart cannot stop anything: by the time a number is on it, the money is gone. Growzo puts the check in front of the call. Before an LLM request, a SERP query or an engine probe is issued, the remaining budget is consulted; if the spend would cross the cap, the request is never made. Metering happens afterwards, into a ledger denominated in paise, per project and per source.

Budget — this project, this month
Monthly cap (Core)Rs 4,120 of 10,000
Engine probes today12 of 20
Pages published today4 of 10
Tracked queries73 of 100
Illustrative figures. Your bars are your own ledger, in paise.

80 percent — the soft alert

A warning, not a brake. Work continues, and the operator has room to raise the cap, narrow the tracked-query set or let the month finish. A stop nobody saw coming is a support ticket; a stop that announced itself twice is a decision.

100 percent — the hard stop

The next call does not go out. Inside the autopilot the budget is re-checked between every one of the eight workers, so a run that reaches the cap mid-pipeline halts at that boundary rather than completing an expensive stage first. See the eight-worker loop.

02 · The constants

Three tiers, and the daily ceilings that matter more.

The monthly rupee cap is the outer wall. The per-day limits are the ones that shape behaviour, because they bound the recurring work — probing engines and re-checking positions — rather than the one-off work of publishing. Both are enforced at runtime rather than reported after the month closes.

TierMonthly capPages a dayTracked queriesProbes a day
LiteRs 3,000 / month3 pages30 queries5 probes
CoreRs 10,000 / month10 pages100 queries20 probes
ProRs 30,000 / month30 pages500 queries60 probes
These bound what the software may spend with your own vendors. They are not a price list: Growzo is self-hosted and bring-your-own-key, so the invoice comes from your model and SERP providers, and this is the ceiling the software refuses to cross on your behalf.
80%
Soft alert
A warning. Work continues and the operator can act.
100%
Hard stop
The call is refused before it is made, not reconciled after.
paise
Ledger unit
Money, not credits — reconcilable against a real invoice.
8
Budget re-checks per run
One between every pair of autopilot workers.
03 · What each action costs

Published unit costs, in rupees.

Every metered action has a published price, so the cap is not a black box you top up until the warnings stop. Four numbers cover almost all of it, and they are the same four the ledger bills against.

ActionUnit costWhat one unit is
SERP callRs 0.30One Brave query for one tracked keyword
Engine probeRs 0.20One brand prompt sent to one AI engine
PublishRs 0.05One page published through the CMS
EmbeddingRs 0.01Per chunk embedded for retrieval
Publishing is the cheapest thing Growzo does. Probing engines is the recurring cost, which is why the daily probe cap exists at all.
Ledger — metered after the call
Brave SERP · 40 queriesRs 12.00
Engine probes · 20Rs 4.00
Pages published · 4Rs 0.20
Embeddings · 260 chunksRs 2.60
Day totalRs 18.80
Illustrative day. The unit costs are not illustrative — they are the constants above.
04 · Show the working

The worst case, with every input shown.

A cap is only reassuring if you can check whether you will ever reach it. So here is the heaviest recurring load the product allows, worked through rather than asserted.

The inputs

Pro allows 60 engine probes a day, the highest daily probe ceiling in the product. An engine probe costs 0.20 rupees. A month is taken as 30 days.

The arithmetic

60 probes a day for 30 days is 1,800 probes a month. At 0.20 rupees each, that is 360 rupees a month — 12 rupees a day.

The conclusion

360 rupees sits far under the Core tier’s 10,000 cap, and nowhere near Pro’s 30,000. Sustained probing at the maximum permitted rate is not what exhausts a budget.

What actually does

LLM generation. Writing and editing pages is where the money goes, which is why the budget is re-checked between workers rather than only at the start of a run.

The point of showing the working is not the answer — it is that you can redo it. Every number in it is on this page: the daily probe ceiling from the tier table, the unit cost from the unit table. Nothing had to be taken on trust, which is the same standard the AI Crawler Blocking Index holds its own published research to.

05 · Computed, not maintained

A transparency page with zero customer data.

Growzo publishes its cost page from the same constants the ledger bills against. It is not a document someone remembers to update when a rate changes — it is arithmetic over the live constants, so the published figure and the billed figure cannot drift apart. And because it is computed from constants rather than from usage, it contains no customer data at all: there is nothing in it to leak.

One source, two readers

The runtime reads the constants to decide whether a call may happen. The public page reads the same constants to explain what a call costs. A single edit moves both, in the same direction, at the same moment.

Nothing about anyone

No project totals, no account names, no aggregate usage. A transparency page built from customer data has to be redacted, and redaction is where these pages quietly stop being published at all.

Honest empty states elsewhere

The same doctrine runs through the product: any surface without real data behind it renders an explicit sample-data notice, so a demo can never be mistaken for a measurement.

06 · The distinction

These caps are not a price for Growzo.

Worth saying twice, because rupee figures on a product page read like a price list and these are not one. Growzo is open source, self-hosted and bring-your-own-key. You hold the model, SERP and analytics accounts, the vendors invoice you directly, and the caps on this page are the ceiling the software refuses to cross while spending your money on your behalf. No subscription price is stated here, and none is emitted in this page’s structured data either.

Bring your own keys

Growzo’s only vendor SDK is Anthropic’s. Everything else it talks to is reached with credentials you supply and can revoke, which is also what makes a hard cap meaningful — the software is spending money it does not own.

Pre-1.0, and said so

Growzo is pre-1.0 software. The capability boundaries are published on the overview page rather than discovered after purchase, and the cost mechanism described here is one of the parts that is finished.

07 · Questions

Cost questions, answered plainly.

Is 10,000 rupees the price of Growzo?

No. Growzo is open source, self-hosted and bring-your-own-key — you run it and you hold the vendor accounts. The tier figures are caps on what the software is permitted to spend with your own model, SERP and analytics providers before it refuses to make another call. Nothing on this page is a subscription price, and no price is stated anywhere in the page's structured data for exactly that reason.

What actually happens at 100 percent of the cap?

The call does not go out. The budget is checked before the request is made, so at the cap the request is refused rather than sent and reconciled later. A soft alert fires at 80 percent so the stop is not a surprise. Inside the autopilot the budget is re-checked between every one of the eight workers, which means a long run halts at the boundary instead of one expensive stage past it.

What exactly is metered?

Every LLM call, every SERP call and every engine probe. Each is checked against the remaining budget before it happens and metered into the ledger in paise afterwards, per project and per source. Published unit costs are 0.30 rupees for a SERP call, 0.20 for an engine probe, 0.05 to publish a page and 0.01 per embedded chunk.

Where do the published unit costs come from?

From the same constants the ledger bills against. The transparency page is computed from them rather than maintained alongside them, so the published figure and the billed figure cannot drift apart. It contains zero customer data — it is arithmetic over constants, not a report about anyone's account.

What are the daily limits on each tier?

Lite allows 3 published pages a day, 30 tracked queries and 5 engine probes a day. Core allows 10 pages, 100 queries and 20 probes. Pro allows 30 pages, 500 queries and 60 probes. The daily probe cap matters more than the monthly rupee cap in practice, because probes are the recurring cost and pages are not.

Why cap in paise rather than in credits?

Because a credit is a unit the vendor defines and can redefine. Paise are money: the cap means the same thing next quarter as it does today, the ledger can be reconciled against a real invoice, and nobody has to work out what a credit was worth this month.

Set the ceiling before you start.

Growzo runs on its own application and its own sign-in — an Autocloz account is not required. Pick a cap, and the software will refuse to cross it rather than explain it afterwards.

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