Pick the slowest schedule the job can live with

Grok Bot's floor is clear: routine schedules must be at least five minutes apart. Five minutes is the fastest you can go — it should almost never be where you start.

Here is the same routine (20,000 tokens in, 1,000 out, about $0.046 a run) across common schedules for a 30-day month. Read it as a ladder of compute, not as an invoice:

How often        Runs / month     Yardstick cost
every 5 min      8,640            ~$397
every 15 min     2,880            ~$132
every 30 min     1,440            ~$66
every hour       720              ~$33
4x a day         120              ~$5.52
once a day       30               ~$1.38

Every step down the ladder is a big saving, and the jump from hourly to five-minute is the steepest: twelve times the runs for, usually, a sliver more freshness. The question to ask for each routine is brutally simple: what would I actually do with the extra minutes of freshness that I can't do on the slower schedule? If the honest answer is "nothing," you have your schedule.

A rough starting guide, from how most teams actually use these:

• Build or pull-request status on an active repo: every 15 minutes is plenty.
• Inbox or ticket triage: hourly.
• Competitor pages, docs, dashboards you're keeping an eye on: once a day.
• Reports, board reviews, weekly summaries: once, on a fixed schedule.
• Overnight audits and clean-ups: once a night.

The discipline is: start slow, speed up only on evidence. Set the routine at the slowest cadence you think could work. If you later miss something real — a genuine, this-actually-cost-me miss, not a hypothetical — then move it one rung faster and see if that's enough. Most routines never need to move. The instinct to run everything every five minutes "just in case" is exactly the instinct this course is trying to break, because "just in case" is paid for 8,640 times a month.

There's a timing detail worth confirming when you create a routine: check the next-run time it shows you, and set the time zone so a "daily at 8:00" routine fires at 8:00 your time, not somewhere else's. Grok Bot shows the next run when it creates the routine — glance at it before you walk away.