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hermes-brain/projects/passepartout/strategy/cost-structure.org
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Cost Structure — Zero Marginal Cost

  • One-time cost: gate-rule encoding for a domain (from hours for codified domains up to months for tacit domains)
  • Near-zero marginal cost: ACL2 proof + Screamer consistency check + VivaceGraph lookup per interaction — all CPU-native, all in-image
  • No recurring LLM API costs for the 80% symbolic reasoning layer
  • After sufficiency flip: pennies per day vs dollars per day for LLM-only

The cost curve inverts: generation is expensive, verification is cheap. This is the inversion Passepartout exploits. This is the core insight of Lisp economics — symbolic verification costs approach zero while LLM token costs remain constant.

Token demand shifts from "every interaction burns tokens" to "only unfamiliar interactions burn tokens." Steady-state per-user LLM consumption drops by an order of magnitude.