Zuck's bot increased our Vercel bill 10x

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.

7 points | by Marciok 1 day ago

5 comments

  • speedgoose 1 day 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.

    [-]
  • raunaksingwi 1 day 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 23 hours 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.
  • al_borland 1 day ago
    I wonder what would happen if you sent Meta an invoice to cover the cost of their usage.
    [-]
    • roosterIllusi0n 1 day 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 23 hours ago
        I am in contact with a lawyer; she said it's a real case to pursue.
      • avinash147 9 hours ago
        [dead]
  • avinash147 1 day ago
    [flagged]
  • tmpsvc2695f5 1 day ago
    [dead]