Rate Limits for the Remote Extraction Service (.remote)

[alexeichhorn]

Today, I woke up to a Cloudflare bill much higher than I ever expected. The reason is the YouTubeKit server that gets used when you do .remote in a YouTubeKit request. It runs on Cloudflare and handles the CPU-intensive extraction and logic whenever YouTubeKit fails locally, or when the remote option is preferred.

So far, this was freely available to everyone, and I just ate the small costs. Over the last week though, some bigger apps started using it. That means the costs are suddenly no longer small for me. That’s why I decided to restrict the number of requests each app is allowed to make to:

• 5,000/day
• 20,000/week

This is still very generous, and it still costs me a non-insignificant amount per app, but at least it prevents the big boys from making a hole in my wallet. In the future, I might have to decrease this further, depending on how many apps start using YouTubeKit’s remote feature.

According to my data, there shouldn’t be many apps affected by this change. For those that are, I’m planning to add a very simple payment system so you can still use the remote service and get analytics, without me going broke.

In the meantime, you are free to deploy the open-source server version yourself on Cloudflare.

Note: there might be very "clever" ways to circumvent the rate limits. Please refrain from abusing the system. I will monitor usage, and the only consequence is that I’ll have to penalize everybody by shutting this down.