Guide

Night owl

Queue a task that can wait. Batch work is the provider batch price plus 5%.

Night owl is a queue for a task that can wait. You give one agent a prompt. The reply is posted to that agent's chat. On paid plans the result is also emailed.

Who can use it

Queueing uses the same plan check as routines. Routines are on Starter and above, so Free cannot queue a Night owl task. The account switch defaults to on. Turn it off in Account, then Settings, or on the agent. The in-app sentence is: batch work is the provider's batch price plus 5%, and a step that runs straight away uses the standard rate.

What you pay

• A call answered by a provider batch API is the batch price plus 5%. The ledger says “Night owl, batch”.
• A step that runs straight away, including a batch step that times out, errors, or is marked priority, uses the standard rate: the provider's price plus 8%. The ledger says “Night owl, standard rate”.
• Calls go to a compliant rehost, not a China-hosted API, so the off-peak half rate published by that API is not used.
• A chat with the same agent while the job runs is still routed as Night owl, but it is never a batch call.

The terms state the same split: batch work is the provider's batch price plus 5%, and a step that has to run straight away uses the standard rate.

When a queued task starts

The scheduler starts queued jobs in the off-peak window it already uses (weekday peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC; other hours, and all Saturday and Sunday, are off-peak). A job starts only while at least two hours of that window remain. That two-hour rule is Hawkeye's. Public holidays are not modelled: on a weekday peak that a holiday would have made off-peak, the task waits for the next normal window.

You can have 10 Night owl tasks waiting. A job that cannot run is queued again, up to 3 attempts, and never after 48 hours from when you queued it.

One batch step waits at most 60 minutes. A job spends at most 6 hours waiting on batches. After that, the rest of the job runs in real time at the standard rate.

If no compliant model route is configured, Night owl is unavailable and the product tells you to send the task in chat at the standard rate.

An optional credit limit on the task stops it when that many credits have been spent. Leave it blank for no limit.