Early Cost Control

Position

Early Prox OS should stay ambitious while keeping infrastructure cost visible, bounded, and reversible. Cost control is a product constraint, not only an operations concern.

Operating Principles

• Static-first: prefer static pages, pre-rendered docs, and deployable prototypes before always-on services.
• Mock-first: make product boundaries visible with mock data before connecting expensive backends.
• Private-first: start with private resources and curated access before open public workloads.
• Manual AI first: use founder-reviewed AI workflows before fully autonomous runtime agents.
• Connector quota: limit connector sync frequency, scopes, and row counts while integrations are immature.
• Dataset preview before full sync: show schema and sample rows before storing large datasets.
• File upload quota: keep per-user and per-resource file budgets explicit.
• Object storage discipline: prefer predictable R2 or S3-compatible layouts, lifecycle rules, and previews over unbounded raw uploads.
• Avoid realtime collaboration early unless a real loop proves it is needed.
• Avoid vector databases early unless semantic retrieval becomes a verified bottleneck.
• AI usage quota: show usage, model class, and review state before scaling runtime AI features.
• Cost dashboard future: expose costs by owner, Studio, connector, dataset, model family, and storage class.

Stages

Self-host and community editions can eventually let heavy users own their own infrastructure cost, but that should not be used to avoid designing sane hosted quotas.