Cloud Deployment

DEPLOYMENT_MODE=cloud runs the managed, multi-tenant SaaS offering: self-serve signup, one umbrella organization per customer holding all their brands, Stripe subscription billing, and plan-enforced limits. Local, demo, and whitelabel deployments are unaffected by everything on this page — outside cloud mode, entitlements resolve to unlimited and none of the billing code paths execute.

On top of the shared variables (DATABASE_URL, BETTER_AUTH_SECRET, SCRAPE_TARGETS, DEPLOYMENT_MODE), cloud requires:

The plan catalog lives in packages/config/src/plans.ts — prices, limits, sampling rates, and the premium pool per plan. The application references Stripe prices by lookup key, never by price id, so one bootstrap command provisions any Stripe account (test or live) to match the catalog:

Re-run it after editing the catalog; it only creates what's missing (Stripe prices are immutable, so amount changes create a new price and move the lookup key). Then configure a webhook endpoint in the Stripe dashboard:

The webhook-maintained subscription table is the single source of truth for billing state; both the web app and the worker read it on every decision, so plan changes, payment failures, and cancellations apply without restarts. A payment failure keeps tracking alive for a 7-day grace window, then pauses tracking (data stays readable) until Stripe recovers the payment.

The webhook also emails the org's admins on payment failure, recovery, and subscription end. These notices go through the same RESEND_API_KEY / RESEND_FROM_EMAIL configuration as the auth emails — no additional setup.

Enable Stripe Tax and Smart Retries in the Stripe dashboard. Before launch, walk the full lifecycle against a test-clock customer with packages/cloud/scripts/verify-stripe-lifecycle.ts (see its header for usage).

Checkout offers an "Add promotion code" field, so a launch or partner code needs no code change — create the coupon and its promotion code in the Stripe dashboard (Product catalog → Coupons) and hand out the code. Restrict it there to the plans, durations, or first-time customers it should apply to; the app never sees the code and does not validate it.

Two limits worth knowing:

To verify, create a test-mode promotion code and subscribe once through the app.

The instance-level SCRAPE_TARGETS defines the menu customers pick from. Configure one target per standard platform (the run policy uses the first match per model), plus a grounded target for each model sold in the premium tier:

Platforms are offered to customers only when they appear in both the plan menu (STANDARD_PLATFORM_MENU) and SCRAPE_TARGETS.

Some models are configured twice on purpose, and the two entries are sold differently:

The two tiers are independent, not two rungs of one ladder. A brand's picks run on every one of its prompts; a premium model is chosen on individual prompts and runs in addition to them. One prompt might carry Claude and Grok while the next carries only Grok and a third carries none, and all three still run the brand's four picks. A premium model need not be picked, and picking a model does not discount its premium slot — resolvePromptRunPlan builds the two sets from different inputs (brand.enabledModels and prompt.premiumModels) and simply concatenates them.

Which models are sellable that way is a premium flag in CLOUD_PLATFORMS, not a model id threaded through the code: today Claude, Grok and ChatGPT (GPT-5 Search). Adding another means adding the flag and a grounded target — nothing in the schema, the guards or the run policy names a model.

"Grounded" means a direct API call with the model's own web search on, which is what isGroundedApiTarget decides. Web search alone doesn't say it: every scraped target is :online too, because a consumer surface always searches. It is the combination that costs.

Every pick samples at the plan's rate, whether it is scraped or an API call — a model is not premium, a grounded call is. Only the grounded targets depart, at PREMIUM_RUNS_PER_DAY, which a custom plan can raise through the premiumRunsPerDay override.

Qwen, DeepSeek and Mistral carry no :online variant at all: they have no native search tool, so OpenRouter would fall back to Exa, whose results are not a surface a consumer would ever see. They report mentions but no citations, since a run with no web search returns no source annotations — as does any ungrounded pick.

Grok is sold only as a premium target, grounded — it is the one model on this list with no ungrounded entry in the cloud menu. Its own answers run about $0.004 per call against a plan design point near $0.004 per run, because OpenRouter prices Grok's output at several times a scrape and Elmo pays for output tokens, not queries. One of four picks devoted to it, sampled four times a day, would cost more than the scraped surface it displaced. Metered once daily out of the paid pool, it prices the same way grounded Claude does.

The customer-facing version of this distinction is how the LLM settings page is laid out: three cards — Scraped Engines, LLM APIs and Premium — each explaining in its own description what that group tells you about a brand, with the pick budget and one save bar shared across them. Providers declare which they are; DataForSEO declares both and picks per target, since pinning a model version routes to LLM Responses instead of the scraper.

The third card behaves differently per mode. In cloud it reports the premium pool rather than offering checkboxes, because grounded calls are metered per prompt/model pair. Self-hosted has no pool, so a grounded target there is an ordinary pick.

Those tooltips also carry a per-run cost estimate and a monthly projection for the brand — but only in local mode, where the operator pays the providers. Cloud and whitelabel omit it: the person looking pays a plan price rather than the bills, and the per-provider numbers behind it are internal attribution estimates (packages/lib/src/usage/cost.ts), not quotes.

Local mode also lists the platforms this instance has not configured, with the providers that can serve each and a link into that provider's section of the setup guide. The suggestions come from providersByModel(), derived from STATUS_TARGETS, so every one is a combination the scheduled provider workflow exercises. A test asserts the reverse too: every model in KNOWN_MODELS has a status target, so a platform can't ship on the menu without something watching whether it still works.

Three layers, all resolving through getOrgEntitlements(orgId):

Every provider call is recorded in usage_events with the org, brand, prompt, target, and a rough cost estimate (tune the per-provider numbers in packages/lib/src/usage/cost.ts against real invoices).

Custom plans are configuration, not code. Insert (or update) a row in organization_settings:

Every field is optional and overrides the org's plan (or the Business plan when planOverride: "custom" marks an org billed outside self-serve — such an org is fully entitled without any Stripe subscription). The shape is validated by entitlementOverridesSchema in packages/config/src/entitlements.ts; malformed JSON falls back to plain plan limits, never to unlimited. extraPlatforms entries must also exist in SCRAPE_TARGETS to actually run.

The cloud build-out ships in the same migrations every deployment runs. Plan limits do not: outside cloud, entitlements resolve to unlimited before any query, so every write-time guard and the worker's run policy short-circuit and behavior is unchanged. subscription, organization_settings and prompts.premium_models sit empty or unused.

Two deliberate improvements come along for the ride: the LLMs settings page edits brands.enabledModels directly, and a prompt re-fired early (e.g. by the self-healing scheduler after a provider outage) re-runs only the targets that are actually stale instead of re-sampling every model.

Two things do change for every install. usage_events is written in all modes — one row per provider call, success or failure — because it is the per-run attribution and provider failure-rate record, not a billing-only table. It has no retention job, so it grows with run volume. And migration 0014 deletes duplicate member rows before adding the unique index it should always have had; whitelabel installs are the ones likely to have any, since the Auth0 sync could race itself. It keeps the most-privileged, then oldest, row per (organization, user) and is verified against a seeded database in CI.