Startup's $7k Vercel Bill: A Tale of AI Bot Scraping
2025-04-15
Metacast, a podcast startup, faced a near-$7,000 Vercel bill due to a surge in AI bot traffic. Amazonbot, Claudebot, and other bots sent 665,000 requests in a single day, scraping thousands of images from their 1.4 million podcast episode pages. Vercel's Image Optimization API, while making the app snappy, proved costly. The startup quickly responded, blocking the bots and disabling image optimization for external URLs, averting disaster. This incident serves as a cautionary tale for startups about the potential costs and risks of unexpected AI bot activity.
Read more
Startup
AI bots