Webhound - A research engine for your agent

makes sense, flagging the lack of evidence as a limitation instead of just going quiet is the right default. thanks for the answer

The budget dial is a smart framing. Research has no natural finish line, and looking finished is exactly how a shallow answer slips through.

The thing I would want in the output is a fetch date on every source, so a report from last month can be re-checked instead of trusted forever. Does the dataset mode keep a timestamp per row?

The budget dial is the right primitive. We maintain a pricing dataset where the answers change monthly and every number needs a source you can defend - and the failure mode of most research tools is a confident summary over dead or circular citations. If the reports really keep the working documents attached, that's the part worth paying for: auditing the claim afterwards, not just reading it.

Taking the blunt-feedback request at face value, because we shipped the same stopping problem in a different domain and got it wrong in a way worth warning you about.

We run an AI that makes real phone calls — booking, chasing refunds, following up. Same shape as your research agent: no natural finish line, and "it stopped" and "it succeeded" look identical from the outside.

On the dollar budget: I think it's a genuinely good control and a bad stopping rule, and it's worth being clear which one you're selling. A budget bounds your downside — real, valuable, and the thing that makes the pricing honest. What it can't do is tell you whether the answer is done. Those come apart in the case that actually hurts: budget consumed, report returned, and the question was answerable in the first ten cents but the agent spent the dollar circling. The user can't tell that from a finished-looking report, and the budget was never designed to catch it.

The failure that cost us most was worse than that, though. We had chains that terminated and reported success when the real outcome was that every attempt had been rejected before it ever went out. Nothing crashed. The model wrote a confident completion. The gap was that we let the model self-report the outcome.

What fixed it, and it's the bit I'd offer you: the agent emits a structured decision — done, continue, stop-and-ask, exhausted — never prose, and then a separate validator checks that decision against ground truth and can override it. The model proposes; something dumber and more literal disposes. We also had to make "stopped because the world said no" a first-class terminal state distinct from "stopped because I ran out" — a number that says do-not-call-again is a permanent stop, and retrying it is worse than useless.

Mapping to yours: budget-exhausted and question-answered should be visibly different outcomes in the returned report, not both rendered as a finished document. If I can't tell which one I got, I can't tell whether to spend another dollar.

On your second question — sources and notes do help me decide what to trust, with a caveat we learned the hard way: citation covers the trigger, not the claim. A report can cite entirely real sources and still assert something those sources don't support. If your research notes show the reasoning step and not just the inputs, that's the more valuable half.

What does your report look like today when the budget runs out mid-question?

"Both answers can look finished" whether you spent ten minutes or ten hours is the real problem this is addressing, and it's a genuine one. Curious how Webhound communicates the confidence level of the output to the user, like does a $2 report come with any signal about what it probably missed or what claims are still weakly supported, or does it always look equally authoritative regardless of how much budget was consumed?

depth dial is a really usefull touch 👏 agent research infra heating up fast