The problem
A serious factory operator holds several subscription coder plans at once — Codex, Claude, z.ai, Kimi. Each is prepaid capacity with its own shape: usage windows, rate limits, session ceilings, reset schedules. Today the dispatcher routes by capability and metered cost tier, which quietly wastes the resource already paid for: a plan hour that expires unused is pure loss, while a metered token spent when plan capacity sat idle is an unforced error.
Treat every coder plan as a schedulable resource. Spend plan capacity first, meter second, and let the windows shape the schedule.
The spend page already shows the symptom: runs on subscription plans meter $0, so the ledger cannot even see the factory’s largest real input cost.
What it takes
Plan-usage telemetry
Per-provider adapters that know each plan’s window, limits, and remaining capacity — observed, not guessed. This is the prerequisite for everything else, and it also fixes the $0-metering blind spot: a plan-attributed run can carry a notional value even when no invoice exists.
Scheduling policies
The dispatcher gains a policy layer above the capability tiers:
- plan-first routing — work that any plan-covered model can do goes there before a metered model is considered;
- window packing — as a plan window nears reset with capacity left, the scheduler pulls eligible backlog forward to consume it;
- metered overflow — metered spend becomes the explicit overflow valve, visible as a decision rather than a default.
A two-ledger cost model
Every run records both its metered cost (what an invoice would show) and its plan draw (which plan absorbed it, valued against the plan’s price). Cost-per-outcome then works across both ledgers, and the scoreboard can finally answer: which plans earn their subscription?
Routing experiments
The tier verdicts hint that models have niches — the workhorse, the heavy-lifter, the sprinter. Deliberate routing experiments across plans turn those hints into policy: which work does each plan absorb best, at what failure cost?
Where it starts
The first note is not written yet — deliberately. The initiative starts when the plan-telemetry contract is designed, because every policy above depends on trustworthy capacity signals. Until then this sheet records the intent: the factory should be as deliberate about whose capacity runs the work as it already is about which model does.