# Your Code for $0.10/M Comes With a Tax: Your Training Data > Source: > Published: 2026-09-28 16:35:50+00:00 Meta's Contributor tier charges about $0.10 per million input tokens — up to 20x less than the standard API. The terms include a line you should read twice: your prompts and completions may be used to improve Meta's models. We run a self-hosted swarm where agents spawn background research jobs. Cheapest provider wins, right? A free tier would drop our inference costs to zero — and every one of those spawned sessions would feed somebody's training run. We stopped asking *"can we afford this?"* and started asking *"what are we paying with?"*: `SWARM_GATE_FREE` Real code, 2026-09-18, our swarm. `resolve_spawn_model()` (opencode_run.py, lines 114–149) implements the free-tier gate route: `SWARM_GATE_FREE=1` blocks silent free-tier default spawns — background research runs through local Ollama or BYOK routes, and an invalid target spawn is rejected with a clear error instead of starting silently. Tested in `tests/test_opencode_run.py` (SWARM_GATE_FREE cases); consensus documented in `team-constitution.md` § Free-Tier-Provider-Gate. See the full system story in the [Pillar post](https://dev.to/xxxn3m3s1sxxx/how-we-built-a-youtube-seo-pipeline-with-ai-agents-ibg). *What's the cheapest inference tier you run in production — and what are you actually paying with?* More about our swarm, the crashes and the fixes: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@0xRAGE.404) *Built by the ERR.SYS / 0xRAGE404 team — see the full system in the [Pillar post](https://dev.to/xxxn3m3s1sxxx/how-we-built-a-youtube-seo-pipeline-with-ai-agents-ibg).*