# Nothing bills while nobody is working

> A quiet household shouldn't pay rent on an empty office. The idle floor is a product requirement, and the computer is summoned when a turn needs it.

Published 2026-09-04

Canonical: https://chattic.us/updates/nothing-bills/

A quiet household shouldn't pay rent on an empty office. So Chatticus holds no always-on process in the token path, and there's no load balancer parked in front of the API waiting for traffic that isn't coming. The transcript is DynamoDB. A stream is scoped to **one turn**, and reconnecting is just a new request that reads chunks already committed.

The computer is summoned when a turn needs it, not assumed at login. Readiness is per-capability — talking, files, browser — so a bot's first word can land while the machine behind it is still coming up.

Zero at idle is the requirement. A design that's cheaper on average but charges rent all night loses.

Workers pull jobs; the control plane never reaches into a garage Mac. The same Ubuntu image runs on Fargate, EC2, and local Docker, and durable disk is an S3 snapshot plus a local cache on whichever host is current.

This is written down so we can't quietly trade it away. [Design challenges](/wiki/design-challenges) lists the requirements and, just as importantly, the non-requirements. [Messaging](/wiki/messaging) is the transcript and the one-turn stream. If a later post contradicts those two, believe those two until we publish a correction.

## Related wiki

- [Shared computer](/wiki/shared-computer/)
- [Always-on](/wiki/always-on/)