The Kill Switch Blog

Stories from the front lines of runaway cloud and AI bills — and how to stop them. Written by the team that got a $91,316 Cloudflare bill and decided to build a kill switch.

June 4, 20266 min readOrigin story

The $91,316 bug: I gave every unit in my RTS its own AI agent

Side-vibing an RTS while Cursor wired every unit to its own Durable Object — connections that never closed. A few weeks later the invoice had five digits and a comma. The full autopsy — commits and all.

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May 30, 20264 min readAWS

Your empty S3 bucket has a credit card

An empty bucket, doing nothing, ran up a $1,300 bill on ~100 million requests the owner never sent. How the internet can spend your money — and why you need a floor under it.

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May 30, 20264 min readArchitecture

The $1M default: how WebSockets quietly taxed Recall.ai

Nothing failed. A completely reasonable WebSocket choice was just a little too slow, at enormous scale, for a year — and the cloud sent them the difference. The cloud bills your inefficiency, brutally.

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