Won't an AI run up a big bill editing my site?

It's a fair worry. AI editors are usually billed by how much text they read and write — the "tokens" that quietly add up behind the scenes — so it's reasonable to picture a bot chewing through every page of your site and handing you a bill. On bernard that isn't how it works, and it's worth knowing why.

What a change actually costs you

Two simple options, and no surprise bill either way. If Bernard does the work on his own AI, a job costs a shell or two — roughly one shell for one improvement, priced by the size of your home, not by the hour. Shells arrive with your move-in and you earn more as you go, and if a change doesn't take, Bernard hands the shell back.

If you'd rather, connect your own ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and it's on the house — the AI's thinking is billed to your own account, so you can ask for as much as you like without spending a thing here. Either way there's no meter running and no per-edit invoice. There's more on the your-own-key option in What does it cost?.

Why bernard doesn't waste effort

The reason editing stays cheap is that bernard's AI is given precise tools and told to do the least work that gets the job done — not to read your whole site and think out loud.

He looks before he reads. Asked to fix a phone number or a link, the AI searches your site for the exact spot first, instead of opening every page to hunt for it. That turns a big read into a few lines.

He sends the change, not the page. For most edits the AI hands bernard a small instruction — "set this link to that", "change this heading" — and bernard makes the change. Your page itself never travels back and forth through the AI, which is where the cost usually piles up.

One ask fixes every page. A site-wide change — a new address in every footer, say — is a single pass, not the AI plodding through your pages one at a time.

Every job has a ceiling. There's a hard limit on any single task, so even a confused or looping attempt is stopped and tidied up rather than left to run up cost.

We watch it, and keep making it cheaper

bernard records what every edit costs and treats that as something to improve. After a real editing session, bernard reviews how the work went — what got re-read, which step wasn't worth it, what tool was missing — and uses that to sharpen the tools and instructions so the next edit does more with less. Over time that's why the AI keeps getting leaner at the same jobs.

That reviewing and monitoring runs on bernard's account, never yours. It doesn't spend your shells and it isn't billed to your own AI key — it's simply how we keep the promise that editing your site stays quick and affordable.