Cold starts on free hosts can make a demo look broken to first-time visitors

An indie founder sent a demo link late on a Sunday, and the first request took nearly 40 seconds because the free host had gone to sleep, causing a visitor to leave before the page loaded. The first request from a new visitor is what matters most, and free hosts and throttled model endpoints both slow down at that moment. The article proposes a shell script that measures warm, cold, and model-call latency against a deployed URL after a period of idleness. It explains how to interpret the time-to-first-byte and total times, and notes that the ratio between cold and warm requests matters more than raw numbers. The author warns that scheduled keep-alive pings can be unreliable or violate free-tier terms, and suggests manually pre-warming the URL shortly before sharing it.