Prepaid Tavily hop vs the next retriever key in .env?

GPT Researcher’s getting-started still exports TAVILY_API_KEY (plus the RETRIEVER swap to Bing/Serper/Exa/…) so a research run can leave the box.

I built apifare (formerly apipay) so that hop sits on a prepaid MCP meter instead: one bearer token; governed proxy; no Tavily/Serper/Exa keys in .env for those calls; caps + kill switch. Founding users get +1,500 credits on the first successful call.

Worth a look if a prepaid meter covers GPT Researcher retrieval instead of the next retriever key?