Background
Built in public

How TokenScale ships.

TokenScale is a single static website with no servers, no framework, and no build pipeline in the usual sense. It's deployed by dragging one zip file onto a host. Here's the whole machine — because the "how" is half the point.

One idea: the live site is the truth

Most of the complexity in shipping software comes from disagreement about what's actually live. TokenScale removes that by making it un-fakeable: the live site reports its own version number, and that number is the only truth — not a branch, not a folder, not someone's memory. Every change is made in one working copy. Each build stamps a version, runs its checks, and is archived — forever — as a single zip in staging/. To ship, you drag one of those zips to the host and read the version straight back off the live page.

_deploy/
the working copy — every change lands here
staging/
each build — version-stamped, guarded, kept forever
the live site
drag the zip up; it now reports its own version. That's the truth.
Build a candidate. Test it. Ship it or reject it. Repeat.

The prices re-check themselves, every night

TokenScale's whole job is to be right about prices — what 22 AI providers charge, turned into things you can picture (an email, a novel, a PhD thesis). So every night the numbers are re-verified against each provider's published rates and folded back into the site — a new build, straight to the archive. A price move on a Tuesday shows up by Wednesday morning.

The code that does this is deliberately simple. What compounds is the record — a continuous, day-by-day history of what AI actually cost. Every verified day is one nobody can go back and collect.

It refuses to lose things

The hardest bugs in any deploy aren't crashes — they're silent omissions: a file quietly dropped, a page that vanishes, a feature that reverts. So every build runs a guard: the new version must contain everything the last one had. If a single file would go missing, the build fails and nothing ships. Lessons learned the hard way, encoded so they can't repeat. And because every build is kept forever, going back is trivial — any earlier version can be dragged live again in seconds.

What it adds up to

That's it. A countdown of AI prices, kept honest by a version the live site can't fake and a nightly habit. See the prices →

© 2026 Bilton Projects · built in public TokenScale · Journal