A content pipeline is easy to fake and hard to finish. This one refuses the mock path: every step calls a real provider, every artifact is written to disk, and a run that cannot reach its provider says so instead of rendering placeholder copy.

Content Foundry is a local web workbench built around seven pipelines. Graphic Matrix turns a topic into a long-form article, a 3:4 and a 16:9 cover and a social rewrite; Faceless Shorts returns a scene-by-scene script, a 9:16 cover and the opening narration; Multi-Voice Podcast writes a two-person script and voices it; E-commerce SKU produces selling points, a hero image, a lifestyle image and marketplace copy; Content Repurpose rewrites a pasted transcript per platform; Quality Gate scores a cover against a rubric; Narrated Voice returns a script and its track.

The mechanics stay small and readable. Each pipeline is a typed list of steps in the backend, a step calls DeepSeek for text or OpenRouter for images and speech, and the run streams step events to the browser over SSE. Artifacts land under the backend output directory and the Archive is built from their metadata, so there is no database and no backend build step. Text, image and speech models are each one environment variable away from a different model.

The repository ships a full verification run rather than a claim: seven pipelines, nineteen steps, nine media artifacts, 172 seconds and $0.34 in provider cost. When a key is missing, the studios fall back to a replay mode that says so and produces no artifacts. The limits are written down as well — no video assembly, no speech-to-text, generated cover text can be wrong, and the app is desktop-only with no multi-user isolation.

Read it for how a typed step list becomes a streaming run with real files behind it, and how per-step provider cost stays visible instead of hiding in a monthly bill.