Costs and controls

The client makes small model calls for exactly two things:

• distilling — turning the useful parts of a finished session into one or two graph nodes;
• nudging — suggesting, mid-session, that a discovery is worth capturing before it vanishes.

Nothing else on the client calls a model. Briefings and digests are compiled from the graph, not generated. (In remote mode the server also runs an ingestion model to type and link captures; that cost sits with whoever operates the server, not with your client.)

Seeing what it costs

Every model call the client makes is journaled locally, under $SPOR_HOME/journal/llm-calls/. Summarize spend with:

spor cost
spor cost --since 2026-06-01
spor cost --project harbor --json

--since/--until bound the date range, --project scopes to one project, and --json emits machine-readable output.

Turning pieces off

Both callers can be disabled independently, via the environment:

export SPOR_DISTILL=0   # no end-of-session distillation
export SPOR_NUDGE=0     # no mid-session capture suggestions

With both off, Spor makes no model calls at all from your machine: briefings, digests, the queue, and manual spor add continue to work, because none of them require one. What you lose is the automatic write-back — you would record outcomes yourself with spor add.

Supplying your own backend

Instead of disabling a piece, you can point it at any command you control:

export SPOR_DISTILL_CMD=/usr/local/bin/my-distiller
export SPOR_NUDGE_CMD=/usr/local/bin/my-classifier

The contract is deliberately small: the prompt arrives on stdin, the response is read from stdout. That is enough to route the calls through a local model, a different provider, or a proxy that enforces your own budget and logging.