I added a cache to save money. It nearly took the app down, and the alert looked like an attack. A postmortem on reading the fine print.
We spent a weekend making a free, public app cheaper to run, and by Monday it was briefly unusable. Not because of an attacker. Because of me, an incremental cache, and a free-tier limit I never read to the end of. Read the full dispatch →
Turnstile is genuinely unlimited and free. The catch isn’t the price — it’s knowing where your bill actually comes from.
Cost is a security property. Map the surfaces that spend money, then cap every one of them — and prove the cap actually caps.
Restraint is a senior skill nobody blogs about. Three hardening ideas that were correct in theory and would have broken production.
Do your CI agents run as root?
Every dispatch here is real work — a decision I actually made, and what it cost.— Rajat, editor
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