Push/deploy policy

Netlify (netlify.toml) auto-deploys on every push to main, and on the Personal plan (effective 2026-09-15) each production deploy costs 15 credits against a 1,000-credit monthly allowance -- roughly 66 deploys/month before running into overage. .github/workflows/blog-sync.yml runs hourly and can generate a commit worth pushing (new estate sale, new shop listing, a sold- status flip, a new video, a new AM Northwest segment, ...) far more often than that, so pushing is deliberately decoupled from committing.

tools/push-gate.mjs is what actually runs git push, on every hourly workflow run, deciding per this policy (set 2026-09-15, at the owner's request, after Netlify's per-deploy credit cost came up):

1. A brand-new estate sale posts to estatesales.org -> push immediately. This is the one thing worth spending a deploy on right away, since it's also what can trigger the site's hello-bar/upcoming-sale announcement.
2. Everything else batches and pushes once a day, at 9am Pacific.
3. Never more than one push per Pacific calendar day. If a new-sale push already went out earlier today, today's 9am batch (or a second same-day sale) waits for tomorrow -- it does not stack a second push.
4. Manual edits made through Claude are just regular commits. When asked to "push it live," the change gets committed, not force-pushed -- it rides the same gate as everything else and goes out at the next allowed slot (immediate, if a sale happens to trigger one first, or the next 9am batch otherwise). If the owner ever wants something out right now, that's a deliberate, explicit override of this file's default -- say so.
5. Hard cap: never more than 65 pushes in a calendar month. As the month's count climbs, rule 2's interval stretches automatically:
   • 55-59 pushes this month -> batch interval becomes 36h
   • 60-64 pushes this month -> batch interval becomes 48h
   • 65+ pushes this month -> hold everything, no exceptions, until the month rolls over

State lives in tools/push-log.json (an array of ISO push timestamps, trimmed to the most recent 400). It's the only thing push-gate.mjs trusts to know "did we already push today" / "how many pushes this month" -- it's appended to and folded into the commit it's about to push via git commit --amend, so recording a push never itself costs a deploy.

The monthly count uses the calendar month in Pacific time, not Netlify's exact billing-cycle anchor (currently the 15th) -- simpler to reason about, and still conservative relative to the real 1,000-credit budget.

Changing the policy

All five rules and their numbers (9am, 65/month, the 36h/48h throttle thresholds) live as named constants at the top of tools/push-gate.mjs -- change them there. If the actual Netlify plan/credit cost per deploy changes, update the math in this file's intro paragraph too.