I just finished building Inbondz, a serverless API on Cloudflare Workers that extracts pure text from URLs (strips HTML/CSS/JS). Because it's a free endpoint (api.inbondz.com/v1/extract), I had to figure out a way to stop abuse without a traditional server. I ended up using a D1 SQL ledger to track IPs and hard-cap them at 50 requests/day, plus a global 100k limit. For those of you building on the edge, is D1 the most efficient way to handle this, or is there a better way to track daily IP limits without burning through read/write quotas? (If you want to try breaking my current limit logic to see how it responds, the docs and terminal commands are at www.inbondz.com).

Unkey handles this well — single API call at the edge that does both key verification and rate limiting in sub-millisecond. Avoids the D1 read-modify-write race condition entirely since the rate limit state lives in their distributed system, not your worker's database.

I would say, you should increase its 50/day limit to make it more generous. Just wait for more donations.

That's great, I am gonna check it out and donate you as well.