Social & Companions
Long-running relationships, growing histories, and per-user costs that rise the longer someone stays.
Companion products have an economics problem the others do not: your best users are your most expensive, and they get more expensive over time.
History grows and gets re-sent
Continuity is the product. But a conversation that has run for months cannot be re-sent in full on every turn, and the usual fixes — truncation, naive summarisation — degrade the thing users are paying for. KV-compatible compression reduces what is sent without discarding the cache, which is what keeps a long history affordable rather than merely shorter.
Most turns are not hard
Small talk, acknowledgement and continuity maintenance make up the bulk of turns and need far less capability than the moments that matter. Assigning every turn the same tier means paying for the hardest turn every time.
Retention makes unit cost decide the business
When a user stays for a year, the cost per turn is the margin. The Ledger reports it per workload, so the number that decides the business is one you can actually see.
Companion conversations are personal by construction. Read section 5.3 of the Privacy Policy before enabling skill learning on them.
Where to start
A waste audit answers this with your numbers rather than ours. Nothing to install, and you keep the findings either way.
This page describes where cost concentrates in this kind of workload. It is not a claim about customers in this sector — Operant is pre-launch and has none to name.