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Always-on bots burn $100 deciding they have nothing to tell me

In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.

$100a week
This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. Bots subscribe to events and background work
  2. Every wake routes through the model, which decides whether anything is worth saying
  3. Most wakes end in silence but are billed as full turns
  4. Reviewer totals roughly $100 spent on no-op wakes in a week and quits the product

Why it’s worth knowing

The failure was not a wrong action; the bots charged real money just to decide to stay quiet.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on builder.io. See the original ↗

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