Quick infrastructure post for the curious. Vaults serves a lot of bot traffic (search crawlers, social card scrapers, AI scrapers, the occasional spam bot). Here is how we stay fast and cheap.
Static where possible
Profile pages render once and get cached at the edge. A bot scraping your profile for an Open Graph card hits the cache, not our database. That keeps the average profile request under 50ms and our database almost idle.
Embeds instead of uploads
Because video and image backgrounds are external URLs (see why Vaults uses URL embeds), the heavy bytes come from YouTube and Imgur, not from us. Our origin only serves the tiny HTML shell.
What we watch for
- API spam: write endpoints are protected by auth + per-account checks.
- Scrape floods: cached pages absorb most of it for free.
- Function overages: minimized by keeping logic small and pushing media to external CDNs.
What this means for you
Your profile loads fast everywhere, even if you go viral. We don't pass costs back to you because we engineered them out, not because we are quietly losing money. Vaults is built to stay free without needing a subscription.