BotCost.dev: Free Analyzer to See How Much AI Bots Cost Your Site
BotCost.dev is a free analyzer that lets you paste your Nginx, Apache, Cloudflare, or Vercel log file and immediately see which AI bots are crawling your site and exactly how much bandwidth they're burning. No account, no upload — everything stays in your browser.
How it works
- Drop your log file — supports access.log, access.csv, or vercel-logs.json. All processing is client-side.
- Analyze — the tool matches each request against 18 known bot fingerprints including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bytespider, CCBot, and Perplexity. It calculates the estimated bandwidth cost in dollars.
- Block — outputs a ready-to-paste WAF rule for Cloudflare, Nginx, Next.js, or a robots.txt snippet. Copy and deploy instantly.
Key numbers from the source
- 38% of all web traffic is now non-human, mostly AI scrapers.
- For a typical site with 50k visitors/month, AI bots cost an estimated $180/month in bandwidth.
- BotCost verification latency is <10ms, running at Cloudflare's edge with zero impact on real users.
Why this matters
If you run a site with public content, bots like GPTBot and ClaudeBot can rack up significant bandwidth costs. This tool gives you a concrete dollar figure so you can decide whether to block them. The one-line WAF rule approach means you can stop the bleeding in minutes without complex configuration.
📖 Read the full source: HN AI Agents
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