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.
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.