Your Code for $0.10/M Comes With a Tax: Your Training Data

The ERR.SYS / 0xRAGE404 team added a free-tier provider gate to their self-hosted agent swarm after noting that Meta's Contributor tier, at roughly $0.10 per million input tokens, may use prompts and completions to improve Meta's models. The SWARM_GATE_FREE flag in resolve_spawn_model() (opencode_run.py, lines 114–149) blocks silent free-tier default spawns, routing background research through local Ollama or BYOK and rejecting invalid target spawns with an explicit error.

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 .