Vercel free tier almost maxed out because of Claude's AI bot. Is this normal or did I mess something up?
I run a small Next.js 16 site, cocbaselinks.com. Not much real traffic. But my Vercel usage this month is scary close to the Hobby (free) limits:
- Fluid Active CPU: 3h 23m / 4h
- Fast Origin Transfer: 6.5 GB / 10 GB
- Function Invocations: 265K / 1M
- Edge Requests: 249K / 1M
I checked the logs and almost all of it is claudebot (Anthropic's AI crawler), 46K out of 58K requests in just 12 hours, all hitting a batch of new SEO pages I added a couple days ago.
Turns out those pages had a caching bug, a tiny per-user part (bookmark icons) was accidentally making Next.js treat the entire page as dynamic, so every single bot visit skipped the cache and did a full expensive render. I think I fixed it, but I'm honestly not sure if this is a "welcome to running a real website" problem or something I should be more worried about.
Has anyone else been getting hit hard by AI crawlers like this? And is it normal for a small site to eat this much of the free tier that fast, or does this usage look off to you?