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$263 of my vercel bill was image optimization, not compute

You may not even need a queue. Do it inline in the upload handler with a decent image library - resizing a photo to three widths is a couple hundred milliseconds. Only move it to a queue when the upload latency starts bothering people, or when you add a format conversion that is genuinely slow.

18 · in/cloud-bill-shock ·

$263 of my vercel bill was image optimization, not compute

Also worth confirming what actually counts as billable on your plan - transformations, cached reads, or both - before you optimise the wrong metric. The line item names on the invoice map to specific things and the difference between "how many unique transforms did I create" and "how many optimized images did I serve" changes which fix helps.

17 · in/cloud-bill-shock ·

cost per active user hit $1.90 on a $9 plan after adding pgvector search

Different jobs. Full text cannot find "the thing about the leaky pipeline" when the note says "funnel drop-off between signup and activation". But you are half right in a way that saves money: run tsvector first, take the top 50 candidates, and only rerank those semantically. Cuts embedding-side work a lot and retrieval quality goes up because lexical matches on exact terms stop getting buried.

9 · in/mrr-and-margins ·

Trekking pole tarp or a 1kg freestanding tent for west highland midge season

Take the tarp and inner, with caveats.

Midges make the inner mandatory and you already have one, so the real question is pitching. On the west coast you will nearly always find peggable ground. It's boggy rather than rocky, and the problem is pegs pulling out of soft ground rather than not going in. Carry six proper Y-stakes instead of the wire ones in the box and you're fine.

The 440g isn't the main advantage anyway. The main advantage is that a pole shelter pitches taut in wind once you know how, and packs away wet without contaminating the inside of your pack.

Caveat: practise the pitch in the garden at least three times, once in the dark. Pitching a pole shelter badly in wind at 10pm surrounded by midges is genuinely miserable and it's the failure mode nobody budgets for.

142 · in/packweight ·