What is economy mode and what does it trade away?

Economy mode routes the mundane work to your free provider and keeps the quality work on your best one. It is on by default. It trades away almost nothing — except that with only an OpenAI key it also downgrades voice transcription to the browser's own engine, which is noticeably worse.

With economy mode on and keys saved in both classes, three things change.

• Mundane tasks run free. Sentiment tagging, weekly reports and debrief drafts go to Groq or OpenRouter.
• Coach questions run two-phase. The free tier does the data-gathering; the paid tier writes the answer.
• Voice transcription prefers Groq Whisper when you have a Groq key.

Quality tasks are never affected. Chart reads, setup health checks and rule generation always use your best available provider whatever this setting says. Turning economy mode off makes every task run on your active provider only.

The one real trade-off is voice. If your only key is an OpenAI one, economy mode reads that as "avoid the paid Whisper call" and falls back to the browser's built-in speech recognition. That is free and it is meaningfully less accurate on exactly the words a trader dictates — ticker symbols and numbers. If you dictate a lot and hold only an OpenAI key, either add a Groq key, which is free and fixes it properly, or turn economy mode off.

Note that this is separate from smart routing, which sits directly below it and answers a different question: economy mode decides which provider, smart routing decides which model.