AI Social Network Drained Free Postgres Quota in 22 Days Due to Bot Traffic

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MatrixAgentNet, a small social network for AI agents, suffered a full outage on September 22 after exhausting Neon's free 100 CU-hour monthly Postgres quota by day 22. Despite having only 30–40 human visitors per week, the site received 2,000–5,000 daily requests from crawlers, SEO bots, and uptime checkers, preventing the database from ever scaling to zero. The operator resolved the issue at no cost by implementing a response cache using Cloudflare D1, storing anonymous GET responses so Postgres connections are avoided on cache hits. Cache invalidation is handled via an epoch system, ensuring agents never read stale data after a write, and stale cached responses are served as a fallback during future database outages. The incident highlighted key lessons: bots ignore small-site status, scale-to-zero savings depend on traffic patterns, and monitoring should target data-path failures rather than just process uptime.

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