Third-party services and costs
The system is designed to run on things you already own. After handoff nothing routes through the developer's accounts, servers, keys or subscriptions.
| Service | Needed for | Owner | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud project with the Gmail API enabled | OAuth client and API access | you | no charge for the Gmail API |
| The dedicated Gmail account | sending | you | your existing account; a Google Workspace seat is optional (it makes the OAuth app Internal and lifts the daily limit to 2,000) |
| A server | hosting the admin and the scheduler | you | any small Linux VPS (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) or a machine you already run; the app idles at well under 200 MB of RAM |
| Domain name and TLS certificate | HTTPS for the admin and the OAuth callback | you | a domain you own; certificates are free through Let's Encrypt (Caddy does this automatically) |
| Anthropic API key (optional) | the model fallback for page layouts no heuristic fits | you | pay per use, no subscription; a fallback call sends at most 14,000 characters of page text, so with Claude Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens it costs roughly two to five cents per page, and it only runs on pages that need it |
| Python packages | runtime | open source | free (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, BeautifulSoup, httpx, APScheduler, openpyxl, google-auth) |
Nothing else. No SaaS, no per-seat licence, no metered scraping service, no email-sending platform: the emails go straight from your Gmail account through Google's API.
Ongoing effort
A few minutes a day in the review queue. Monthly: glance at the backups folder and the run history for repeated fetch errors (a university redesigns a page, so its source needs re-adding). Yearly: a restore test.