I’m starting a new series of videos: stories from the vibe coding trenches, with real life situations encountered during my vibe coding endeavors. As you already know, I have 15 apps in the App Store already, and I started all this in February this year.

The first story is about how I overpaid $150 to Cloudflare, because of a rookie mistake. If you prefer to watch this as a video, there you go:

If not, keep reading.

I launched Flight Lens because I wanted to monitor air disruptions and delays – I still travel a lot – plus a simple way to track ticket prices. I use a relatively expensive API for the airport / airborne planes data and the disruption engine is completely proprietary. It takes flight delay data, planes in the air, announced delays at takeoff and landing, and so on, and turns that into crystal clear, actionable information. Almost all the app work went into making that engine efficient enough to stay inside the paid API’s beginner plan.

The API itself was about $45 a month. The backend was deployed on Cloudflare for the usual $5. After almost 2 months of back and forth I launced and everything looked fine. People were using the app and the feedback was really nice.

Then the Cloudflare invoice arrived: $150.

I’ll do the math for your: that is three times the API cost. I literally had no idea what hit me. But then I drilled down the Cloudflare’s billing dashboard, and found out that database reads and database writes are separate units. While I was heavily optimizing the API side of the disruption engine, I had written roughly 150 million times in a month. I was nowhere near the read limits, but the writes had gone way over.

So, I went back in and optimized again, this time watching both the API limits and the database write ceiling. I also set up billing alerts so I get notified before anything climbs too far (in all fairness, those alerts should have been there from the start).

Even with more than thirty years of writing code, these newer services still surprise me – especially if skip how they actually charge. The takeaway here is “just pay attention”, nobody will warn you if you ht some obscure paying ceiling.

The next stories in this series will be lighter, this one was the only expensive one (so far).

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