Brand Studio docs

Quick start

Two ways in: the hosted version, or your own clone with your own keys.

Use the hosted version

In the alpha

Accounts are free; the signup page says how first credits are granted during the beta. Reports cost 1 to 3 credits by depth (Snapshot, Market or Deep). A report that produces no evidence is never charged. Card checkout is not connected, and bring-your-own provider keys are not enabled on the hosted version.

  1. Enter a URL. The free instant card reads that one page and tells you what it found — no account, no charge.
  2. Confirm we found the right business. A language model checks the match before anything is spent, and it can only rule a candidate out, never talk one in.
  3. Choose how deep to look. Snapshot is one credit; Market is two and adds the market around you; Deep is three and adds the deepest reads we can buy. The chips say what each one turns on, and the list is read from the code that gates it.
  4. Run it. Fourteen checks, and a cost ledger at the bottom showing what the run actually cost us to produce.

No evidence, no charge

A report that produces no evidence is never charged. A credit is a dollar of depth, so a balance of three is three Snapshot reports or one Deep — your choice, made per report.

Run it yourself

  1. Clone the repository and run npm install.
  2. Copy .env.example to .env and paste in the keys you have. Every one of them is optional.
  3. Run a pull. Whatever you have keys for runs; whatever you do not have keys for is reported as unavailable, by name, rather than silently skipped.
git clone <this repository>
cd brand-studio-lightweight-system
npm install

cp .env.example .env      # paste in whichever keys you have
npm test                  # everything runs offline, no key required

# one report, from one URL
node scripts/brand-studio-live-server.mjs

What self-hosting costs

There is no license key, no phone-home, and no feature gate. Self-hosting runs at the providers' own cost — the hosted version adds a margin on top of that, which is what pays for it to keep existing.

Your own keys on the hosted version

Not enabled in the alpha

Not enabled on the hosted version during the alpha. Self-hosting, above, works today. The steps below describe how it works once it is enabled.

  1. Sign in and open your provider keys in settings.
  2. Paste the keys you already have. Each one is checked against the provider before it is stored — the cheapest call that provider has, which costs nothing — and a key that does not work is refused rather than saved.
  3. Run a report. It uses your keys, the providers bill you directly at their own list prices, and no credits are charged.

At cost, with no server to run

All-or-nothing per report, deliberately: if any paid provider is still ours, the report is charged normally — otherwise we would be paying the largest line on the ledger for you. Your keys are encrypted before they are stored and are never shown back to you; the settings page can only ever display the last four characters.

Every environment variable, and what each one turns on, is on Run it yourself.

Brand Studio documentation

Every provider we call, every check a report runs, what each costs, and the environment variables to run the whole thing yourself with your own keys.

How it works

One URL, a free card, a confirm step, a fenced queue, fourteen checks, two review passes and a cost ledger — as a diagram and as four rules.

On this page

Use the hosted versionRun it yourselfYour own keys on the hosted version