Cost & Economics
Ajilamu tracks every cloud expense with exact precision. The accounting engine prevents hidden subscription bloat by pricing operations in nanodollars ($10^{-9}$ USD).
Nanodollar Precision
Section titled “Nanodollar Precision”Small API transactions frequently round to zero in conventional monitoring dashboards. Micro-costs accumulate across hundreds of takes and conceal actual production expenditures.
The accounting logic in internal/cost/cost.go calculates charges using integer nanodollars. A fraction of a cent registers on the interface and persists in the ClickHouse ledger.
Published Rate Cards
Section titled “Published Rate Cards”Ajilamu applies the official provider rate cards for cloud model calls:
| Resource | Unit Measurement | Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Chirp 3 HD Synthesis | 1,000,000 characters | $30.00 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash Input | 1,000,000 prompt tokens | $0.15 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash Output | 1,000,000 completion tokens | $0.60 |
ffmpeg operations run entirely on local CPU cycles. The server logs zero external fee for audio stretching and muxing.
The NASA Baseline Measurement
Section titled “The NASA Baseline Measurement”The project measures baseline performance using a committed 75-second NASA sample video dubbed into Malayalam.
| Workload | Measured Realized Cost |
|---|---|
| 75.0s Video (Malayalam) | $0.023414 |
This total covers video segmentation, constrained translation, speech synthesis, and verification reads across all eight dialogue segments.
Itemized Attempt Transparency
Section titled “Itemized Attempt Transparency”Traditional platforms conceal rejected generation retries within flat platform fees.
Ajilamu records every attempt in charges_raw. If Gemini rewrites a phrase twice before achieving a satisfactory acoustic fit, the ledger stores three discrete charge rows. Creators observe the exact cost of each revision.