Triage and synthesis that runs at zero marginal cost on its free_large home, degrades cleanly to a self-hosted ollama_oss floor, and signs every token into a durable audit chain.
The data-analyst is a high-frequency middle node: it takes the research-lead's hand-off, condenses it, and feeds the content-editor. Exactly the unglamorous, high-volume work that must run for free — yet can never be allowed to hallucinate, leak across tenants, or drift unwatched.
Every synthesis job is another LLM call. At fleet scale, routing this workload to a paid frontier model is the difference between cents and five-figure monthly spend.
Cheap cannot mean ungoverned. The same call must pass deny-by-default policy, land in an RLS-isolated tenant, and be signed into the audit chain — free or not.
The data-analyst is one tenant in a live fleet mapped like-for-like to the real Acme org — every call enrolled, policy-gated, and audited.
Among the 7 showcase agents, the data-analyst runs on a fixed schedule and sits mid-chain — downstream of intelligence gathering, upstream of publishing and compliance.
The tier ladder is the mechanism that makes this role cheap and reliable at once. Home is free; the floor is self-hosted; keywords are the only thing that buys a costlier tier.
A real synthesis job: the free_large home returns a 429 under free-tier saturation, the runner catches the LLMError, and the job completes on the ollama_oss floor — still fully governed.
Whichever tier answers, the call takes exactly one path. The PEP validates, evaluates policy, and only on allow forwards the request unchanged to this agent's own soul-svc tenant.
A data-analyst run is deterministic and self-documenting — it leaves behind reasoning, a memory, and a usage record the ROI board reads.
Three independent controls wrap every call this agent makes — none of them optional, none of them bypassable by choosing a cheaper tier.
SoulKey Ed25519 chain per call, durable WAL at /data/audit-wal, shipped to the control plane. RFC5424 syslog → Promtail:1514 → Loki for SIEM.
The agent's writes land only in its own acme_soul tenant. FORCE RLS on Cloud SQL means even postgres is subject to row-level policy.
The ROI board makes the case in one column. The data-analyst's home and floor sit at the bottom of it — the tiers it actually uses cost cents-of-cents while frontier tiers are reserved for escalation.
| Model / tier | Observed $/call | Relative |
|---|---|---|
| opus-4.8 (paid ceiling) | $0.19 | |
| sonnet-4.5 (paid) | $0.03 | |
| deepseek-v4-pro (ollama_deep) | $0.002 | |
| gpt-oss:120b (ollama_oss · this floor) | $0.0015 | |
| Llama-3.3-70B (HF) | $0.0012 | |
| gemma-4-31b:free (free_large · this home) | $0.00 |
Free is the right home, but free saturates. The chronic 429 on free-tier models is precisely why the floor is an owned, self-hosted tier rather than another rate-limited freebie.
The data-analyst agent shows the whole thesis in one workload: routine synthesis runs free, degrades to a self-hosted floor under load, and every call is policy-gated, RLS-isolated, and signed — no exception for being cheap.