Hobby account paused due to AI bot bandwidth abuse

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1

Summary

My hobby account was paused after AI crawler bots consumed ~283GB of bandwidth scraping OG images from my personal photo blog (http://www.colindismuke.photo).

Project Details

What happened

Bot traffic aggressively scraped my /*/image routes - the dynamically generated OG images. These routes bypass CDN caching effectively, resulting
in massive bandwidth consumption I had no control over.

Mitigations I’ve implemented

  1. Added comprehensive robots.txt blocking known AI crawlers
  2. Blocked all /*/image routes from all crawlers
  3. Increased image response cache from 1 hour → 1 year
  4. Enabled Vercel Firewall Bot Management:
    • Bot Protection: On (challenges non-browser sources)
    • AI Bots: On (blocks known AI bots and scrapers)

These changes are deployed but for some reason I got the account paused email 2 weeks after the fact. Looking at the overview for that project shows that >99% of the traffic and bandwidth stops on January 16 after the above were implemented.

Request

Could my account be reinstated? This was clearly bot abuse, not legitimate usage. I’m a hobby user with a simple photo portfolio - the traffic patterns were entirely non-human. With the changes implemented, this shouldn’t recur.

2

I have deleted the project that exceeded the usage limits and will ensure that if I recreate the project in the future that the bot mitigations and challenges are in place.

3

Thank you! Let me know if you have any other questions.

4

Hi Pauline, will my account be unpaused or is the only resolution to upgrade to Pro? Thanks for the reply.