Run schedule & cost

Overview

Run schedule & cost (Settings → What we track) is where a project's capturing is decided and accounted for. A schedule asks every active question on every active AI engine on a cadence — daily, weekly, every two weeks, or monthly — so the trend data behind Analytics, Sentiment Analysis and Insights accrues without anyone pressing a button.

The page has one band at the top and six tabs beneath it.

The one-cycle band

The band states, for the project's active schedule (or for one full cycle when nothing is scheduled), in this order:

1. What one cycle is — P questions × M engines × L locations = N answers per cycle. Each factor is printed separately. SERP legs (Google AI Overview / AI Mode) are their own unit and, when on, appear as a separate line — they are never folded into the answer count.
2. Whether it will run — if the cycle is larger than the room your plan's daily cap leaves, the band says so in plain words: "8 answers per cycle · your plan allows 4 a day". Nothing is disabled by this sentence; the capture gate decides when you start a run, and this is the warning before it.
3. What it costs — for organization owners and admins: an estimate per cycle and, for a repeating cadence, per month. A one-off run has no monthly figure. The line under it says whether the per-answer rate is this project's own history or the platform average. Members and viewers see the counts and a one-line reason instead of a price.
4. The budget it draws on — the project's budget mode in words (lifetime cap, monthly cap, uncapped), its allocation, what has been used this period, and the next cycle's date and time.
5. Two money facts — "Your plan includes N answers a month at no charge; U used" (a fact about money, not a cap: nothing refuses a capture for exceeding it) and "Used this month: X answers" (observed — no monthly limit exists).

If the band cannot be loaded, it says so and offers a retry. It never shows "no data" for a read that failed.

Tabs

Each tab is linkable (/dashboard/schedules?tab=cycles, ?tab=spend, and so on). The old /dashboard/runs and /dashboard/usage addresses redirect to their tab.

Creating a Schedule

1. Open Run schedule & cost and click New schedule.
2. Enter a descriptive name (e.g., "Weekly Brand Monitoring" or "Daily Competitor Check").
3. Choose a cadence. The price of the cadence you pick is shown beside it, and the next five cycle dates are previewed below:
   • Daily — the highest cadence available; best for time-sensitive campaigns, launches, or crisis monitoring.
   • Weekly — once every 7 days.
   • Every two weeks — once every 14 days.
   • Monthly — once a month, on the same day of the month.
4. Optionally scope the schedule to one prompt group, so a topic runs on its own cadence.
5. Decide whether to run the first capture now. It is off by default: creating a schedule spends nothing until its first cycle unless you turn this on.

First capture behavior: with the switch off, nothing is captured until the first scheduled cycle. With it on, one capture starts as soon as the schedule is created, charged like any other run.

Run once now

Run once now (top of the page) opens the same capture form as Capture snapshot — one prompt, a hand-picked set, or every active prompt — priced as a single run, never as a month of them. The price line re-prices as you change the selection. If the run is larger than your plan's remaining daily room, the form says so beside the button; the button stays enabled and the server decides.

What Happens When a Schedule Runs

1. All active prompts are queried — every prompt marked active (or the schedule's group) goes to the configured engines.
2. All active engines are used — each prompt is sent to every engine you have turned on.
3. One answer per combination, per location — 10 active prompts × 3 engines × 1 location is 30 answers a cycle. SERP legs are counted separately.
4. Usage is tracked — token usage and costs are recorded for each capture and roll up on the Spend tab.

Monitoring cycles

The Cycles tab shows each cycle's status in plain words:

• Queued — waiting for the worker
• Running — capturing now
• Complete — every expected answer landed
• Partial — some answers did not land; the reason (credits, a provider outage, a policy pause) prints under the status
• Failed / Cancelled — nothing landed, or the cycle was stopped; the reason prints under the status

Fires that were refused before they became a cycle (a credit or policy gate) are in the Job log on the Schedule tab, marked Blocked with the reason.

Note: Stuck jobs are reclaimed by a workload-aware timeout (up to a ~45-minute ceiling) rather than a fixed cap, so large-but-healthy captures are not killed mid-run while genuinely stuck jobs are still cleared.

Troubleshooting a cycle that stopped short

• Read the reason under the status on the Cycles tab, or in the Job log.
• Check that your engines are still valid and active (Engines & surfaces tab).
• Confirm that you have active prompts in the project (a schedule with no active prompts has nothing to capture).
• Check the Budget tab and the organization credit balance — a used-up budget is the most common reason.

Managing Schedules

• Pause a schedule — stop captures without deleting the schedule; resume it at any time. Resuming recalculates the next cycle.
• Edit a schedule — change the name or cadence. A cadence change recalculates the next cycle.
• Delete a schedule — permanently remove it. Historical cycles and answers are preserved.

Choosing the Right Cadence

Note: Higher cadences consume more answers and more of your plan's daily cap — the band above the tabs shows the monthly figure for the cadence you run. Health monitoring adapts its thresholds to your shortest active cadence.

Best Practices

• Start with weekly — for most brands, weekly cycles give the best balance of data richness and cost.
• Use daily sparingly — reserve it for short campaigns or crisis monitoring, and switch back afterwards.
• Use groups for different cadences — a daily schedule for a launch group and a weekly one for the rest of the project.
• Read the Cycles tab — a Partial or Failed cycle prints its reason; catch it early.
• Align with your reporting cadence — if you report monthly, make sure the cadence gives you enough cycles to show a trend within that window.