For the past ten years I've run a side project that estimates the word count of books and how long it takes to read them. Maintaining and improving this requires tens of hours a month, and a few hundred dollars in RDS, ECS, etc. costs. Two years ago I was at least breaking even on affiliate income, so the cost put into it was purely my own time and effort which I enjoy. These days my total traffic numbers are about 10x, but human traffic is down 50-70%.

I'm basically paying to host content for AI crawlers to scrape and I don't know how much longer I can do this. I'm adding Goodreads-esque features currently, but if it doesn't get the sign ups I'll be forced to archive the code and take the site down.

Why are you not using a CDN or edge worker? This boggles my mind that you don’t just have something that can scale to billions of requests for pennies