frontpage.

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.

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Zuck's bot increased our Vercel bill 10x

Tell HN: An inside view of Montana's new biotech law

Can I get insurance for company renting humanoids for parties?

Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Zuck's bot increased our Vercel bill 10x

Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

We struggled with DevOps, so built a open source agentic platform just for this

A mnemonic-free wallet where the private key never leaves the phone's TEE

Ask HN: How are you managing aging relatives passwords?

Ask HN: Lesser known features of macOS/iPadOS/iOS/etc. 27

Started Learning Pentesting

Ask HN: Slow OpenAI Inference on AWS Bedrock

Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?

Tell HN: iOS 27 does not allow Apple Intelligence to be disabled

Day 13. Three production applications on AWS down

SuperColoring – a simple crossword generator for learning and fun

Ask HN: Where is all of the AI coded software?

Working on Plug and Play personal AI Memory that works across AI agents

Ask HN: Why 17?

Ask HN: What would make you trust an AI's assessment of your understanding?

Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?