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Zuck's bot increased our Vercel bill 10x

1 points by Marciok ↗ HN
I’m writing this after receiving a Vercel bill that was 10x higher than usual.

The worst part: The increase wasn’t caused by more users, but by +1M requests from meta-externalagent/1.1.

The requests targeted a Vercel preview deployment that we had shared on WhatsApp to test whether its link-preview metadata was working correctly.

We naively never bothered with bot calls; they had never caused any problems in the previous four years of our app on Vercel, but that changed when Meta’s crawler began repeatedly visiting this preview deployment.

If you host on Vercel, review your bot-protection settings and make sure preview deployments aren’t unnecessarily exposed. Otherwise, an aggressive crawler could leave you with a surprisingly large bill. And unfortunately, Vercel declined to help to ease this bill.

Zuck is definitely not slowing down.

6 comments

[ 18.5 ms ] story [ 9.5 ms ] thread
al_borland
I wonder what would happen if you sent Meta an invoice to cover the cost of their usage.
roosterIllusi0n
If the cost is high, sounds like it's time to make a call to the fbi. A million requests for the same thing over and over is an attack. Vercel and meta do have business relationships, so one company raising cash for the other sounds convenient.
raunaksingwi
Doesn't it get blocked by IP rate limiting? Nobody should be able to make so many calls to your site that it results in 10x higher bill on your side.

Even if not a crawler, it's basically a DoS attach. More over, why does muse have to crawl your urls so many times?

speedgoose
On one hand, it's very annoying.

On another hand, you realised that you are vulnerable to denial of wallet attacks without loosing that much money.