Blog ·
Pay for activity, not for silence
Most accounts post in bursts: a few posts in a day, then nothing for a week. If you check every account at a fixed rate, most checks find nothing, and you pay for them anyway.
What Feeds does
Each check that finds nothing makes the next one wait 1.5 times longer, up to 7 days. The first post after a quiet spell brings the interval back to the cadence you chose. For an account you check every hour, the gaps after a post grow like this:
| Check after a post | Wait before it |
|---|---|
| 1st | 1 hour |
| 2nd | 1.5 hours |
| 3rd | 2.3 hours |
| 4th | 3.4 hours |
| 5th | 5.1 hours |
An account that posts once a day therefore needs about 7 checks a day instead of 24.
What it means for your bill
Every tracker has two figures, which the console and POST /v1/estimates show before you create it:
- Maximum: every check at your cadence. This is what a monthly budget protects you against.
- Expected: the cost with spacing, from the posting rate we have seen for the account.
For an X account checked hourly that posts five times a day, the maximum is 870 credits a month. For a LinkedIn page checked every 6 hours that posts once a day, the maximum is 2,460 credits.
The trade-off
After a long silence, a new post can take longer to arrive than your cadence. If speed matters more than cost for an account, use a short cadence; spacing keeps quiet accounts cheap either way. If you need a hard ceiling, set monthlyBudgetCredits on the tracker.