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Developer Builds Rate-Limiting System After One User Drained Telegram Bot's Daily AI Quota

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A developer running a Telegram bot powered by Google's Gemini free-tier API faced a critical outage after a single user sent 1,400 messages in three hours, exhausting the 1,500 daily request limit and leaving over 999 other users unable to access AI features. To prevent recurrence, the developer implemented a three-layer protection system consisting of per-user rate limiting, a global daily request cap, and an in-memory response cache for frequently asked questions. The caching layer alone reduced quota consumption by an estimated 50–70%, with no additional infrastructure or database costs. Following these changes, 99% of users were reported as unaffected during subsequent bot usage. The experience highlighted a broader vulnerability in free-tier AI APIs, where no built-in safeguards exist against individual users monopolising shared daily quotas.

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