Cost — Roster docs

Three separate bills, and they behave differently.

The coding agent

The largest by far, and the one that scales with how much work you ask for.

A session's cost is roughly its length. Ours run 11 to 55 minutes of wall clock, and a longer session is a bigger bill as well as a slower one. The lever that matters is not the model setting, it is how much you ask a staff member to do each morning and how much context it has to read to start.

That is why the memory system is shaped the way it is. Boot context here went from about 52,000 words to about 6,000 by moving from a narrative status file to one line per fact. That is a direct, repeated saving on every run of every staff member.

Watch for sessions growing into their ceiling. A run that gets killed at timeout_minutes has been paid for and produced nothing. Health, and roster doctor, report the ratio.

GitHub Actions minutes

Real on private repositories, and easy to forget because it is metered per minute of runner time and every scheduled run consumes it whether or not the run was useful.

Three things spend it more than you would expect:

Timeouts. A run killed at 90 minutes bills 90 minutes.
Mention workflows. Every comment on a tracker triggers a run, even ones the condition gates out. Those are seconds each, but they are not free and they are numerous.
fetch-depth: 0 on the brain checkout, which is deliberate (the agent reads its own history) but grows with the repository.

Public repositories are free, which is why the product-repo lane costs nothing.

GitHub Apps

Free. There is no per-App or per-installation charge. The only cost here is the human minute it takes to install one.

What roster itself costs

Nothing at run time. The framework is not a dependency of anything a tenant runs: the CLI runs on your machine when you ask it to, and the machinery is vendored into the tenant's own repo.

Keeping it down

Prune memory. Deleting is the maintenance. Every line in memory/INDEX.md is read at every boot, by every run, forever.
Do not raise a timeout to fix a slow session. Find out why it grew. A ceiling that keeps being raised is a session that has stopped fitting its job.
Give a mention workflow a shorter ceiling than a daily one. A focused task that runs for an hour has gone wrong, and the ceiling is the only thing that stops it.
Check the ratio, not the last run. Health reports how many of the last ten runs succeeded. One bad run is noise; four is a bill.