Ideas and directions for the tool. Nothing here is committed to a delivery date; it captures possible features and the reasoning behind them.
Context
- YouTube is expensive. YouTube blocks datacenter IPs, so downloads go through a paid proxy metered by traffic. We download audio only to keep that traffic small.
- Other platforms are cheap. TikTok, X/Twitter, Vimeo, etc. download without a proxy.
Possible features
Fact-check quality
- Real web search in the fact-check. Today the model verifies claims only from its training data — no live sources, no citations, and it is blind to anything after its knowledge cutoff. A web-search tool would let it look up current sources and cite them, at the cost of a higher per-call price, slower answers, and a UI that shows the sources.
Cost reduction
- YouTube captions without a proxy. Fetch YouTube’s own captions instead of downloading and transcribing audio. It only helps videos that actually have captions, auto-captions are lower quality, and it adds a fragile dependency — so with the proxy now cheap, the saving is small. Worth revisiting if volume or proxy costs grow.
Spend control
- Global spend cap. A site-wide daily ceiling on YouTube runs so a usage spike can’t blow the proxy budget, with an alert when it gets close.
- Proactive proxy-limit monitoring. We already report clearly when the proxy hits its traffic limit; the next step is to surface the remaining allowance before it runs out.
Product polish
- Personal history. A dashboard of your past fact-checks.
- Richer analytics. Per-run cost is already tracked; adding runs per platform and cache-hit rate would round it out.
Already shipped
- Current OpenAI models in the dropdown, including GPT-5 support and per-model knowledge-cutoff display, with an automatic fallback model and the used model shown on every result.
- YouTube downloads audio only to minimize proxy bandwidth; TikTok download fix.
- Clear error messages, admin email on failures, a daily log email, and per-fact-check cost tracking with a stats page and daily-budget alert.
- Real platform detection and URL normalization for reliable caching.
- A public “How It Works” page that discloses the exact prompt, and this Roadmap page.