Questions, and where the line is.

The catalog, the agent tool schema, pricing, stats, poll and delta against persisted packs, and webhooks — against 20 seeded English beats that each carry their own article cluster. Built but not yet switched on: metered billing and receipts. Not built: task-to-topic resolution, watches and briefs. Live ingestion is paused while the topic queries are rebuilt for a 100-beat catalog, so the terminal shows the current state of the graph rather than a moving one.

No, and it is not trying to be. Search answers a question once and forgets it. NewsGraph keeps a cursor per topic, so the question your agent asks on a schedule is whether anything moved — and nothing moved is a cheap, successful, billable answer.

Never. No body field exists at any price. A page holds at most 8 items, each with a headline, a link that resolves to the article, the publisher's name and the time it was published. You get the signal and the citation; you fetch the story yourself.

Topics refresh on a 60-minute target with a 90-minute freshness SLO, and market topics are built to tighten to 5–15 minutes. Every item carries first_indexed_at next to published_at, so lead time is a field in the payload rather than a marketing line. The public comparison harness ships with the next milestone; until then the board on the site is illustrative.

The catalog, the tool definitions and pricing need no credential at all, so you can evaluate the whole contract before spending anything. Early access beyond that is operator-granted while self-serve billing is built: send a note with your use case and you get an account plus a starting balance when metering is switched on.

Usage-based, per answer. A check that returns nothing costs $0.0005 and a check that returns a cited pack costs $0.004. There is no seat, no platform fee and no monthly minimum. You can pay per call, or top up a prepaid balance and draw down from it — card, invoice and stablecoin are all accepted.

That is the design, and it is not live yet. Because the balance is metered per answer rather than licensed per seat, an agent that checks a topic every hour costs about fourteen cents a day — so it can fund its own context out of whatever value it creates. A default daily ceiling of $0.50 and 50 distinct topics keeps a runaway loop from becoming an incident.