The “deployment paused” screen is shown publicly when hard spend limits are reached for a project. These limits are configured by the user.

Spend controls aren’t necessarily about affordability, it’s often for peace of mind (similar to a fixed price server, or a disposal card with a limit).

I also don’t view them as being negative on Vercel (we likely could have alerted them better, as it seems this caught them off guard).

Their traffic isn’t capped and they can change this if they prefer. But I’m guessing there’s some large asset causing unexpected usage, which is why I offered my email. Happy to walk through it with them and figure out a path to optimize.