400 articles a month for $240 in tokens — the pipeline, and what it cannot do

Running this across four sites. Posting it because the "AI content farm" posts I see are either selling a tool or hiding the editing cost.

The pipeline

• Keyword set clustered by SERP overlap, not string match
• One outline pass per cluster, reviewed by a human in about 2 minutes
• Draft generated section by section against the outline, with the SERP's actual top 3 as context
• Automated fact extraction into a checklist a human then verifies
• Human edit pass: 18 minutes average per article

Costs, monthly
Tokens $240 · editors $4,800 (two people, 400 articles, 18 min each) · tooling $190. Total about $5,230, or $13 an article.

What it does well
Breadth. Covering 400 long-tail queries a month for $13 each is not possible any other way.

What it cannot do

• Anything requiring first-hand experience. It will confidently invent having used a product
• Anything where being wrong is expensive — medical, legal, financial
• Original data. It has none, and neither do you after it finishes
• A reason for anyone to link to the page

That last one is the business problem. 400 pages a month with no reason to be cited is a traffic strategy with a ceiling, and the ceiling is getting lower.

The $13 per article with the editor time included is the honest version of this. Every other version of this post says $0.60 and quietly leaves out two salaries.

The tokens are rounding error. The editors are the business, which is not what I expected when I built it.

We charge $0.04/word for human-written and get beaten on price by pipelines like this constantly. What we win on is the fourth bullet, every time, after the client has tried the cheap route.

Using the live top 3 as context is the part I would steal. Most pipelines generate in a vacuum and it shows in the first paragraph.

Where does the 18-minute edit go? Fact checking, or making it sound like a person?

Roughly 7 minutes fact checking, 11 minutes removing the three structural tics every model has. The second half is the one that cannot be prompted away.