Cost model
Public Penrose cost has four distinct components. Keep them separate when budgeting.
1. Documentation website
A static documentation site can usually run within a free tier or for roughly $0–$20 per month at small-to-moderate traffic. For example, Cloudflare Pages currently documents free, unlimited static asset requests; its free plan allows 500 builds per month and 20,000 files. The primary unavoidable cost may be only the domain, plus optional analytics.
2. Read-only corpus
An immutable JSON corpus behind object storage and a CDN is inexpensive. A practical early budget is $5–$50 per month, depending on traffic, record size, logs, and whether search uses a database.
A database-backed explorer, full-text search service, monitoring, backups, and a small API commonly move the planning range to $25–$200 per month before substantial traffic. Cloudflare's current Workers paid plan, as one concrete reference point, starts at $5 per month and includes 10 million requests.
3. Claim processing
Local observed GLM-backed runs that stopped early cost approximately $0.001–$0.003 per run in recorded model charges. That is not a full-pipeline estimate: reconstruction, independent verification, repair, and long papers can require materially more calls.
Use these conservative planning bands:
| Workload | Planning cost per claim |
|---|---|
| Structured claim using a deterministic executor | $0.01–$0.10 |
| Paper extraction plus deterministic reconstruction | $0.05–$0.50 |
| Generated module, repair, and independent verifier | $0.25–$2.00+ |
At 1,000 claims, a reasonable model-and-compute reserve is therefore $100–$2,000, depending on the mix. Enforce per-run and daily budgets rather than relying on an average.
4. Data and human review
Data can dominate every other category. Public APIs may be free; historical order books, survivorship- corrected equities, options, and licensed academic datasets can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month—or may forbid redistribution entirely.
Human review, source licensing, abuse handling, and incident response are also real costs even when the infrastructure bill is small.
Suggested launch budgets
| Phase | Monthly planning range | Excludes |
|---|---|---|
| Static documentation only | $0–$20 | domain registration |
| Docs + read-only curated corpus | $10–$100 | licensed data |
| Moderated submissions, up to a few hundred claims/month | $100–$750 | reviewer labor and premium data |
| Open public intake | $500+ with hard quotas | reviewer labor, abuse spikes, premium data |
These are engineering estimates, not provider quotes. Validate storage, bandwidth, model, and database pricing immediately before launch.