“I woke up to a $10,000 bill”

We'd just launched. I mean, just. The day before. I had left my desktop feeling elated and exhausted that evening because the months of work had finally led to me having an app out in the wild.

Nobody else knew. Actually, three people did, but they were all related to me, so they don’t really count.

My new night time routine now consisted of watching “founder advice” on YouTube. I say watching — mostly I stare blankly while men from Planet Coding Bro talk in riddles. I pick up bits. Think – picking up Swedish whilst assembling flat packs.

But that night, of all nights, I was really tired, late to bed due to getting greetful over the line to launch. When this much more human guy came on….we’re still talking about YouTube here! He started telling me (I know he was talking directly to me) that he woke one morning to a $10,000 bill because he had forgotten to put a circuit breaker on his app.

A circuit breaker.

I knew I didn’t have a circuit breaker

Unless you count the one in the kitchen next to the tumble dryer.

I went into a cold sweat. I was too tired to do anything about it at that point.

Surely it wouldn’t happen on my ONE night without it...would it?

And yet there I was, 2am, 2:30am, 4:04am…..doing what any self respecting founder would do, lying in bed, wide awake, catastrophising in the dark.

Nobody knew we existed. But at 2am, "nobody knows we exist yet" and "we are completely exposed" played out exactly the same in my head.

My little app, out in the wild, all alone, catnip to the underbelly of the online community. Bots. Scripts. People who batter other peoples API for fun.

By 6:30 am I gave up pretending to sleep and decided to sort it.

Spoiler: nobody was battering anything. We were fine. But I now had a list — a long one — of things we should have in place. The circuit breaker was just the start. When I started to really delve into this, the list was huge…and frightening.

What followed was one of the most useful conversations I’ve had with AI since starting greetful. We went through the app function by function, asking the same question over and over:

“If someone tried to abuse this, what would actually happen?”

We looked at every way that this could be abused.

A few of the things we put in place, in plain English:

Rate limiting. Like a bouncer on the door at the nightclub. No one's getting through that door 400 times in an hour, however keen they are.

A circuit breaker. A couple of ne’er-do-wells having been unsuccessful in their quest with the bouncer, have caused a bit of havoc out front, so said bouncer emails me. Me. At home. In my dressing gown, presumably.

Screening in and screening out. No-one dodgy goes in, no-one dodgy comes out. A very polite airport.

Throttling — ok, I think we’ll just leave it there for now.

One major consequence of all this late‑night realisation was having to remove the “See your magic screen”

the try‑before‑you‑buy moment that sat proudly at the centre of the landing page. It was one of the most important sales tools I’d built. But apparently there are gremlins out there who use public AI widgets to rewrite War and Peace, or finish their 25,000‑word assignment on quantum physics, and that meant it had to go.

That was a real gut punch. So I had to think my way around it. If I couldn’t have what I’d planned, how could I get closest to it? How could I still show what greetful could do, without effectively hanging a “free AI for all” sign in the window?

So I built something different. It still fulfils what we wanted — it shows the magic, the tone, the feeling — just not in the “play with the AI right here on the homepage” way I’d originally imagined. And yes, greetful still has a very generous free tier. You can absolutely try it before you commit — you just need to sign up first. No biggie, really.

I made sure we put everything possible in place to protect what matters — the people who choose to use what I’ve built.

I would always rather spend time making my app a safe place, the best I can do, rather than “shipping more tools” and doing half a job on each of them. For me, I need to concentrate on one thing at a time, and get it right.

So, that’s the point of this tale really:

You don't have to be technical to build things now. But, just because we can now do these things, we still have to be responsible and stubborn, we need to care, to make sure those things are going to fulfil their purpose while keeping everyone safe.

You make the decisions, so make sure they’re the right ones.