wiki/open-questions.md
Scout — Open Questions
Pricing and unit economics
What are the real fixed monthly costs for hosting, security/firewall, monitoring, support tooling, maintenance, and payment operations?
What is the measured variable cost per direct scrape, crawl page, rendered page, browser minute, screenshot, LLM extraction, and retained artifact bundle?
What target gross margin should Scout use for hosted usage?
Should the first paid model be prepaid credits, wallet/pay-as-you-go, or a small subscription plus overage?
What free hosted allowance is safe enough for beta without inviting abuse?
At what volume and price does hosted Scout break even and produce profit?
Browse-and-harvest UX
How should the browse-and-harvest flow work from the user's perspective? Human navigates listing-by-listing — does Scout auto-detect new page loads and capture? Or does the human click a "capture this page" button each time? The CDP-attach pipeline exists; the UX trigger doesn't.
Embedded pane integration
The live browser lives at /app/live-browser as a standalone page. Should it be embedded as a panel in the main /app UI? As a tab? As a modal? Design decision needed.
Residential proxy budget
T1 stealth rung supports proxy rotation but no proxy provider is configured. Budget decision needed from Arijit.
LinkedIn/Zillow logged-in sessions
Hardest-rung validation needs Arijit's Mac with logged-in browser sessions. Legal/ToS sign-off needed for LinkedIn capture + job auto-apply use case.
Quality bugs (known, deferred)
- Checkout-interstitial junk product records ("Hang Tight!" pages captured as products)
- Duplicate product variants
- Empty brand field
- API key embedded in
/appHTML (acceptable for single-user, not for multi-user)