Billing escalation: bot-driven bandwidth overages, refund form blocked (#01C19RYpO6OicLKx)

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1

Hi team, requesting a staff member to route this to billing.

Case ID: #01C19RYpO6OicLKx (opened Jul 14, no response yet)

Summary: Sustained AI crawler traffic (meta-webindexer and similar, visible in Top User Agents) drove abnormal usage on a small hobby-scale content site (sooly.co.kr) from mid-May through July.

Why this fits your review criteria:

  • Baseline vs spike: typical monthly invoice was ~$22; during this period charges ran dozens of times higher
  • Abrupt start: traffic began spiking mid-May, no product/marketing change on my end
  • Bot-concentrated: each cycle involved ~2 TB Fast Data Transfer and 14M–17.6M edge requests, driven by crawlers — not human visitors
  • Hobby / no revenue: personal project; I’ve since downgraded to Hobby and enabled bot blocking

Affected invoices:

  • IXXSPMPV-0003 (May 11–Jun 4)
  • IXXSPMPV-0004 (May 11–Jun 11)
  • IXXSPMPV-0005 (Jun 11–Jul 11)

The problem: The refund form shows these as “Refunded,” but the actual credits processed were minimal (Pro proration only). The bot-driven usage charges themselves were not refunded, and the form is now blocked by those partial credits — so I can’t submit through the normal flow.

Request: Refund of the bot-driven usage portion (excluding Pro subscription fees). I can provide Top User Agents screenshots showing the crawler traffic on request.

Thanks.

2

escalated to case #01WSl5Xa5wesboTj via the support form, with full traffic analysis attached. IXXSPMPV-0003 reaches the 60-day refund window on Aug 3 — requesting a staff member route this to billing before then.

Traffic analysis attached to the case: /breweries received 82.8k requests and /products 48.4k, while the homepage received only 90. /robots.txt was fetched 20 times. Source IPs cluster in a single datacenter /24.

3

It looks like you already received partial refunds for the invoices listed. The team will need to review your specific case to determine if any additional refund is appropriate based on the specific details of your case.

If you have not already, you should implement additional protections to prevent further high usage costs. Rate limits, bot management, WAF custom rules, or simply pausing your project are relatively straightforward options to limit or prevent further usage costs.

I would also recommend spend management to limit excessive usage leading to higher bills.

Thanks for your patience while the team works to resolve all refund inquiries as quickly as possible