How do you rack up a $46k Vercel bill?

TL;DR

A viral site (Jmail for Epstein emails) hit 650 million page views with aggressive preloading, unoptimized assets, and analytics that charged per request—tenth-of-a-penny costs multiplied into $46k.

Key Points

• 1.36% of the bill ($17k) was just web analytics—Vercel charges per request, and logging every visitor interaction at massive scale adds up fast
• 2.Aggressive preloading killed them: hovering over emails fired hundreds of JSON requests per user, great UX but expensive at scale
• 3.Unoptimized assets: a 650KB Facebook icon and ~2MB total page weight meant bandwidth costs exploded across millions of visitors
• 4.Cloudflare would have been dramatically cheaper: 30¢ per million requests vs Vercel's $2, plus free bandwidth for static assets
• 5.The math: 500 requests × 3.5MB per average visitor = 0.1¢ each, but multiply by 650M pageviews and you're in trouble
• 6.Trade-off reality: Vercel's developer experience is best-in-class, but build on portable tech so you can move when costs spike