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Zuck's bot increased our Vercel bill 10x

7 points by Marciok 10d ago

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.

al_borland 10d ago
I wonder what would happen if you sent Meta an invoice to cover the cost of their usage.
- roosterIllusi0n 9d ago
  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.
  - Marciok 9d ago
    I am in contact with a lawyer; she said it's a real case to pursue.
  - avinash147 9d ago
    [dead]
avinash147 10d ago
[flagged]
tmpsvc2695f5 9d ago
[dead]
raunaksingwi 9d ago
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?
- Marciok 9d ago
  Vercel "lets it sleep through" since they make money on these calls. I have no idea why it needs to crawl so many times; I guess that Meta is probably a mess right now, with lots of researchers training many models at the same time.
speedgoose 9d ago
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.
- Marciok 9d ago
  true!
mabini 8d ago
[dead]

7 points by Marciok 10d ago

al_borland 10d ago

I wonder what would happen if you sent Meta an invoice to cover the cost of their usage.

roosterIllusi0n 9d ago
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.
- Marciok 9d ago
  I am in contact with a lawyer; she said it's a real case to pursue.
- avinash147 9d ago
  [dead]

avinash147 10d ago

[flagged]

tmpsvc2695f5 9d ago

[dead]

raunaksingwi 9d ago

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?

Marciok 9d ago
Vercel "lets it sleep through" since they make money on these calls. I have no idea why it needs to crawl so many times; I guess that Meta is probably a mess right now, with lots of researchers training many models at the same time.

speedgoose 9d ago

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.

Marciok 9d ago
true!

mabini 8d ago

[dead]