Brain Decisions
2026-07-17
D017: Defer paid / account-linked service activation to launch
Context: Some features need external services tied to Saif's billing/accounts, the AI demo needs a credit card on Vercel AI Gateway; the analytics pipeline needs a production Postgres + Redis. Saif wants to make billing/account decisions at the end, not mid-build.
Decision: Build and verify every feature against local/dev services; defer production activation of paid/account-linked services to launch (Phase 7).
- AI demo: leave live answers gated (graceful error state shown); add the card + run live grounding checks at launch.
- Analytics: build + verify against a local Postgres + local/in-memory Redis; keep the connection env-driven so pointing at production storage later is just env vars. (Neon + Upstash have no-card free tiers, so even prod likely needs no card, provisioned at launch.)
- Contact (Phase 5): build the Resend send path env-driven (
RESEND_API_KEY); without a key the form degrades gracefully. Real key + verified sender domain added at launch.
Why: avoids committing to billing mid-build; features are fully built + verified now; activation is a fast, reversible env/dashboard step later. Same "do it once, at the end" logic as D015 - Defer Content Translation.
Trade-offs: deployed previews show empty/seed or error states for these features until launch, acceptable and by design. Everything is reversible in minutes.