Every figure in the registry follows the same rules.
Money and time are counted separately and never mixed. The market comparison uses only published sources, and each figure names its own: which role, which page, which date. A mistake is fixed with an entry in the change log, not quietly.
The cost includes only the money a project itself spends: API and token charges on the invoice, paid service credits, and subscriptions the project used, as a share proportional to the time it used them. A free quota counts as $0, and the card names it next to the zero: "$0 · Wordstat quota". Examples are Yandex Wordstat (the keyword-demand tool of Yandex, Russia's largest search engine) used under a grant, a model's free tier, and Firecrawl's starter credits. Zero means no money was charged. It does not mean the work was free.
Three things stay out of the cost, each for its own reason. The server. One builder gets by with a home machine, another rents a dedicated server: the price depends on how the person builds, not on the design. Where a server was used, the "How it is built" section names it on a separate line. The Claude subscription. It serves the whole lab: development, builds, texts, data analysis. Splitting it across projects would take an arbitrary coefficient. Where its use was measured, the project states it on a separate line to show the order of magnitude: in the content pipeline, sixteen batch sessions cost $1,707.13 and produced 92 articles. The number is published, but it does not go into the registry. The author's time. It is counted separately (see the next section).
Paid service credits, such as Higgsfield or purchased Firecrawl packs, are included: they are spent on specific work in a specific project. A credit is valued at the price of the plan it was bought on, and the plan is named next to the figure.
Hardware bought before the lab and not for it is not included either. A calculation on the author's own machine is marked "$0 in money spent" and is not presented as free work. What ran locally is listed in the "How it is built" section.
The author's time is not converted to money at an invented rate. Any such rate would be arbitrary, and the figure could no longer be checked. Instead, each project states hours on a separate line: how long the build took and how long maintenance takes.
So "$0" in the registry means zero money spent, not zero effort. A project built in one evening cost one evening. The project says so next to the money, and one never stands in for the other.
The "market price" column shows what it would cost to pay a person to do the same job for a month. It compares role with role, not a system with a subscription. Each price in the registry is labeled with its role: web developer, SEO expert, content writer and so on.
The source is Upwork, a global freelance marketplace. For each role, Upwork publishes a cost page with "Median hourly rates (USD)": the typical range of rates in its historical contracts worldwide. The registry takes the midpoint of that range and multiplies it by 152 hours.
Monthly price = (low rate + high rate) ÷ 2 × 152 h, rounded to the nearest $100
Why 152 hours. The site already counts a person-month as 152 hours (a person-year as 1,824 hours) when it estimates the cost of code, so a month means the same thing on every page. It is also the most conservative of the usual conventions: 152, 160 and 173 hours are all in use, and the smallest gives the lowest market price.
What the number measures. Upwork shows what a client pays a freelancer, anywhere in the world. The Russian version of the site compares with something else: median employee salaries in vacancies on hh.ru, Russia's largest job site (methodology, in Russian). Both compare role with role. The base is different, so the two sites show different market prices for the same project, and neither is a currency conversion of the other.
When it was checked. The ranges were read on October 7, 2026. Upwork's cost pages are behind a bot check, so they were opened in a regular browser and cross-checked with copies in the Wayback Machine. When the ranges change, the prices are recalculated and the change goes into the change log.
A dash means the job is not sold on the market as a separate service. There is nothing to compare with, and no figure is invented. "N times cheaper" is calculated only where there is a source, never from a dash.
The registry uses six roles. Each line gives the Upwork range, the monthly figure, the project and the source page.
Web developer, $15–50 an hour: $32.50 × 152 h = $4,900 a month. Project: A website built with AI. Source: upwork.com/hire/web-developers/cost
Market research analyst, $25–70 an hour: $47.50 × 152 h = $7,200 a month. Project: AI Competitor Analyst. Source: upwork.com/hire/market-researchers/cost
SEO expert, $15–35 an hour: $25 × 152 h = $3,800 a month. Projects: Website indexing in Yandex, Google and Bing and Topics without competitors. Source: upwork.com/hire/seo-experts/cost
Content writer, $15–40 an hour: $27.50 × 152 h = $4,200 a month. Project: AI writes social media posts. Source: upwork.com/hire/content-writers/cost. The Editor page gives the same $15–40 range.
Customer service representative, $10–19 an hour: $14.50 × 152 h = $2,200 a month. Project: AI sales manager. Source: upwork.com/hire/customer-service-representatives/cost
Virtual assistant, $10–20 an hour: $15 × 152 h = $2,300 a month. Project: Personal AI assistant. Source: upwork.com/hire/virtual-assistants/cost
Across the seven projects, the market prices add up to $28,400 a month. The SEO expert is counted twice, once for each project.
One-off development. The indexing project also shows what writing its code would cost once: 65 hours at the web developer's midpoint rate, 65 × $32.50 = $2,100 after rounding.
The lab's own spending. In the registry, only the content pipeline spends money: it makes images with Higgsfield on the Ultra plan, bought at 40% off in August 2026. That is $77.40 a month, or $0.67 per article. All other projects spend $0. The Russian site shows the same spending as 6,537 RUB: $77.40 × 84.4635, the Bank of Russia rate on August 26, 2026, the date of that calculation.
Where an article quotes facts from the Russian market in rubles, such as competitors' prices or budgets, the dollar amount in parentheses uses the Bank of Russia rate on October 7, 2026: 85.7116 RUB per USD.
If you find a discrepancy, write to Telegram. The raw data and the architecture of every project are open, so anyone can recalculate.
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