Humble Beginnings

At the beginning of 2025, we launched Eurlexa, a user-friendly way to access EU regulations.

Eurlexa is built with SvelteKit. The developer experience was truly great. Naturally, Vercel seemed like the obvious choice for hosting.

Until it wasn't.

We started on the Hobby Plan. As traffic grew, we upgraded to the Pro Plan. However, during the start of the summer, we noticed an extreme increase in bots crawling Eurlexa. At first, we thought this was great—the application uses SSR (Server-Side Rendering) and every page is prerendered, so we assumed our SEO was finally working. But then, the bots went into overdrive.

AI Bots Unleashed

The bot traffic went crazy. We realized that Eurlexa is perfect "food" for AI scrapers. To give you the full picture: on Eurlexa, you can find more than 150,000 EU directives and regulations in all 27 official languages. Approximately an EU law has roughly five different versions thanks to amendments. Eurlexa also enables users to generate "track changes" server-side. Consequently, the number of accessible pages is massive.

The default $20 for the Vercel Pro Plan was no longer enough. Because we wanted to keep Eurlexa free for our users, we absorbed the extra traffic costs ourselves.

To be fair, Vercel did add tools to fight this. During the summer of 2025, they introduced and consistently improved their Bot Management tools.

December Ends the Year (and our Vercel journey)

December brought extreme traffic—reaching 100,000 visits a day. But what hit us hardest was Vercel’s pricing model. The new Fluid Compute model, combined with the traffic surge, led to an exponential increase in costs.

On the other hand, I am incredibly thankful that Vercel also introduced the Spend Management tool. Simply put, it allowed us to set a hard cap. If the cap was reached, Eurlexa was paused.

The Spend Management tool literally saved us. We had fortunately set a limit of $40 in advance. When the bots went crazy, we began increasing the spend cap by $10 increments. These caps weren't being hit over days, but in a matter of hours.

When our costs crossed $100 in a couple of days, we decided it was time for a change. I am terrified to imagine what would have happened without that Spend Management tool; by Christmas, a Vercel invoice would have been a very unwelcome gift.

VPS to the Rescue

We decided to buy a VPS. They are remarkably affordable. After checking out tools like Dokploy, Coolify, and Caprover. We chose Dokploy. The VPS setup was surprisingly easy.

Migrating the SvelteKit app was a bit more challenging. Ironically, AI helped us write the Dockerfile and solve some issues. The most complicated part was figuring out how environment variables worked and changing how they are called within SvelteKit on VPS. But within just two days, Eurlexa was running on our own VPS.

We’ve already learned that managing a VPS is a task in itself. The bots are still coming, and we’ve already had to restart the app several times.

However, we can sleep much better this Christmas. The worst-case scenario now is that our server goes down—but our costs remain fixed.

Merry Christmas to everyone!