💰 newsAPI.ai Spending Strategy

Version: 1.0 | Effective Date: February 2026 (Projected) | Budget: 5,000 tokens / month

Strategic allocation of NewsAPI.ai consumption to maintain mission-critical ingestion while operating within a constrained intelligence budget.

Overview

With a constrained budget of ~166 tokens per day, VFS must transition from a broad "catch-all" ingestion model to a high-precision, mission-centric targeting model. Every token spent must maximize the probability of extracting a verified, groundable factual claim.

1. Differentiated Search Cadence

Daily token allocation should be stratified by authority tier:

Tier 1: High-Authority Entities (100 tokens/day): Prioritize daily scans for mentions of active People and Organizations on the Watchlist. These entities represent the core factual anchors of the system.
Tier 2: Narrative Discovery (66 tokens/day): Monitor active Narrative Themes using Taxonomic Anchors. Restrict results to "Highly Weighted" domains identified in the Source Guardrails audit.

2. Leverage "Fingerprint" Deduplication

Optimize consumption by avoiding redundant reporting:

Event-Based Clustering: Prioritize fetching distinct "Events" rather than multiple individual "Articles" reporting the same data points.
Source Constraints: Strictly filter for English-language, high-reach, or high-credibility sources to ensure structural compatibility with the Neural Service.

3. Smart Triggering (The Taxonomic Bouncer)

Use the feedback loop to refine active searches:

Shadow Feed Analysis: Regularly review Strategic Thematic Recommendations. Promote a category only if it shows a high frequency of Logical Friction.
Contradiction Focus: Prioritize spend on themes where the system detects active friction (unresolved contradictions). Contradiction generates the highest mission value per token.

4. Forensic GCS Vault Prioritization

Reduce reliance on external APIs by mining internal data:

Archive-First Policy: Query the local GCS Vault (Cloud Storage archive) using the Forensic Search mechanism before triggering external searches.
Asset Conversion: Treat every external token spent as a permanent asset purchase; once ingested, data is served from internal forensic caches.

5. Efficiency Index Monitoring

The Resource Oversight dashboard is the primary tool for tactical adjustments:

Cost per Claim: If the Efficiency Index rises above the target threshold, immediately adjust Source Guardrails.
Aggressive Pausing: Pause ingestion from domains that exhibit a high token-to-fact ratio.