Gaia Refusal-First Margin Gate

Gaia refuses illegal, harmful, or personal financial, medical, and legal questions before charging, so a dead query costs the agency nothing. That single behavior is the margin gate. Model every client engagement as two pools: billable queries that clear the refusal filter and produce a cited report at $0.25 USDC or a short answer at $0.02 USDC, and refused queries that burn zero USDC but still consume delivery time. An agency running a competitive-intelligence retainer for a clinic can submit 40 short-answer probes at $0.02 USDC each ($0.80 USDC total) to triage which questions survive, then spend $0.25 USDC per surviving report. The trap is billing refused questions as research work. Gate the retainer on cleared queries, log refusals as scope exclusions, and the $0.25 USDC unit cost stays predictable across the engagement.