Pulso now runs on a credits ledger: 25 one-time lookups when you first use it, and adding watches you already own is free, however many you have.
The app moved onto per-user Postgres on 3 August, every route scoped to the signed-in user, and that unlocked the part that had been waiting behind it: deciding what actually costs something. Research costs me money, so discovery is what spends a credit. Shortlisting, suggestions, price re-checks, one credit each, charged only on success. Importing a collection you already own spends nothing, up to 50 watches, because that is setup, not usage.
The ledger records movements rather than a balance, so there is a full audit trail and grants, referrals and purchases are interchangeable sources. Adding a way to earn credits later never touches the code that spends them, which is how referrals went in the same day: 15 credits per invite, capped at 3, paid when the invitee adds their first watch rather than on signup, because paying on signup makes throwaway addresses profitable.
Then the part that is only worth doing if you say it out loud. The web app shows the count in the masthead, and a note beside every research box reads either "Free, it is your own collection" or "Uses 1 lookup". Nobody can infer free from a number that simply does not move.
The failure caught the same day: the nightly backup had been passing every night while backing up nothing. After the Postgres cutover it kept snapshotting the SQLite file that had stopped receiving writes, and the integrity check counted watches in that same dead file, so it compared a frozen number against itself and agreed forever. The real export now covers all 13 collection tables and refuses any dump containing a watch with no owner. First genuine production backup: 4 watches, 24 shortlist, 49 wear logs.
Also today: rate limits on the paid endpoints at 10 lookups per 5 minutes, per-user photo storage with a 200MB quota and unguessable filenames, an admin view of spend per user, and plainly written terms and privacy pages that admit the awkward things, including that the same watch has priced anywhere from £8,000 to £13,950 across repeat lookups.
