I am writing here as a last resort because I have been waiting 14 days for a human response from Support (Ticket #924443), and the billing situation is becoming critical for us.
We were hit with unexpected Function Duration charges in December and are currently seeing a spike of over $1,900 in January.
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The Cause: Identifying the logs shows this is caused by an aggressive AI scraper.
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The Target: The traffic is hitting a development project that is not associated with a real domain. It is a staging build on a standard .vercel.app URL that is not officially live or advertised.
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Previous Usage: Prior to this, our infrastructure usage was essentially $0.
What makes this critical is that our Spend Management notifications failed completely.
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We have an On-Demand budget set to $200.
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We are currently at 923% of that budget (approx $1,900+).
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We received zero notifications regarding this overage, meaning we couldn’t catch or block the scraper during the holiday period until the invoice arrived.
We use Vercel under the impression of predictable pricing. These charges are due to malicious external traffic on a dev environment, not legitimate business usage.
I need immediate assistance from the Vercel team to:
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Review the Refund Request: Since this was malicious traffic and billing notifications failed to alert us, we are requesting a refund for the illegitimate Function Duration charges.
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Get a Human Response: We have updated Ticket #924443 multiple times over the last two weeks with no reply.
Has anyone else experienced notification failures like this? Any help escalating this to Vercel staff would be appreciated.
Thanks.
