On the bot onslaught

Bear Blog is probably the most successful indie blogging app out there. From what I gather it has enough paying customers to allow its founder, Herman, to run it full time with a healthy salary. My guess is somewhere between two to four thousand paying, but who knows. 

One guy running a profitably SaaS sounds like an indie web dream, but the reality for B2C SaaS is very different. Bear suffered an outage over the weekend because of bots. Herman wrote a very good post about it where he concludes:

The public internet is mostly bots, many of whom are bad netizens. It's the most hostile it's ever been, and it is because of this that I feel it's more important than ever to take good care of the spaces that make the internet worth visiting.

People do not write blogging platforms (and similar B2C indie products) to make money. It’s the worst business idea. They do so because they believe in writing and a better web. Sadly It’s becoming very difficult to run a serious business like this in 2025 as Herman explains in the post. 

Pagecord has at least an order of magnitude fewer paying customers, makes a bit of profit (negligible) but still faces this onslaught of bots. Well over a million requests a month hit the app where actual page views is in the low 10s of thousands.

I have a bunch of protections in place but probably not to the extent of Bear. There’s no auto scaling. I leverage Cloudflare but l can’t be on call 24/7, despite always trying my best if shit happens. When the big attack comes, and it will, it’s going to be messy. 

The time I put into Pagecord is not financially rewarded other than to keep the lights on, so it takes a lot of energy and determination to keep pushing against this rising tide of internet delinquents. 

I will keep pushing because, like Herman, I love my product and I believe in a better internet that is run by the many, not the few ultra-capitalist tech lords.