AgentShield is an application-aware firewall for small web products — indie SaaS, small e-commerce, APIs with expensive dynamic routes — built around one feature nothing else offers at this scale: a hard spend cap. Set the most agent traffic may cost you each month, and AgentShield degrades or blocks it before you pay for it.
$29 due today. $29/mo at launch, locked for life. Fully refundable until launch — and automatically refunded if we don't ship by April 1, 2027.
Why this exists
$30 → $1,933.93
One site operator's monthly Vercel bill, in a month when Meta's crawler alone made 11.18 million requests to their site — against 24.65 million requests from actual users.
“Every single one a serverless function invocation. Every single one I pay for.”
— r/webdev operator report, January 2026 (source thread)
A crawler's request costs the crawler almost nothing. On a serverless or dynamic stack it costs you a function invocation, an uncached database query, an image transform — sometimes a paid LLM call. The damage isn't bandwidth. It's compute amplification, and small operators are the ones paying it.
53%of all web traffic in 2025 was bots (Thales/Imperva 2026 Bad Bot Report)
+187%growth in AI-driven traffic during 2025; agentic-browser traffic up ~7,851% YoY (HUMAN 2026 benchmark)
>6×the function duration AI agents consumed vs. human visitors, measured by Vercel staff in a separate incident
12.5×growth in AI-enabled bot attacks year over year (Thales/Imperva)
Operators in hosting support forums are already asking for the obvious fix — one Netlify user, mid-incident, asked for a hard kill switch: “I'm perfectly happy with my sites going down after 100 GB of bandwidth usage.” Hosts don't offer that as an agent-level control. That's the product.
What AgentShield will do
Hard spend caps, first. Set a monthly ceiling for what agent and bot traffic may cost you. When an identity approaches it, AgentShield throttles, serves a degraded/static version, or blocks — your policy, enforced before the invoice, not after.
Route-aware policy. Strict on the expensive routes — /login, /api/search, /api/generate, /checkout — permissive on /pricing. Protection follows cost, not just bot scores.
Agent governance, not just blocking. Distinguish verified, useful agents from abusive ones, and meter each identity: who is this agent, which routes is it hitting, what has it spent today?
Hosting-independent. A layer in front of your app — reverse proxy / edge worker / middleware — not locked to one platform's ecosystem.
Free, but blunt: basic crawler blocking, no cost awareness, no per-route policy. Granular per-request bot management is an Enterprise add-on.
Platform add-ons (e.g. Vercel BotID)
Real detection — but locked to that platform, and metered per check.
Enterprise bot management (DataDome)
Essentials starts at $3,830/month ($45,960/year). HUMAN, Kasada and F5 are contact-sales.
AgentShield
$29/month. Self-service, hosting-independent, priced for the sites actually getting these bills.
Between “turn on generic bot mode” and “deploy an enterprise platform” there is almost nothing a solo operator can buy. AgentShield is that thing — if enough of you want it. That's what this pre-order measures.
Founding pre-order
$29 /month at launch
Pay $29 today to hold a founding spot. Your price is locked at $29/mo for life — it never rises as the product matures and public pricing moves up.
Fully refundable Change your mind any time before launch and the $29 comes back. No questions, no forms.
Automatic refund deadline If AgentShield hasn't shipped by April 1, 2027, every pre-order is refunded in full, automatically.
Honest validation This pre-order exists to measure real demand. If the founding round falls short, we say so — and refund everyone.
Pre-orders are processed by Gumroad. AgentShield is a product in development by a solo founder — nothing on this page is a live service yet, and the guarantees above are the whole deal.
Questions
Is AgentShield live?
No. It's in development. This page is a founding pre-order: your $29 reserves the founding tier and proves the demand is real before the full build.
What exactly do I get today?
A founding spot at $29/mo locked for life, launch access ahead of public pricing, and the refund guarantees above. The product itself ships after this validation round.
What if it never ships?
Then you pay nothing in the end: refunds are automatic if we haven't shipped by April 1, 2027, and you can request one at any point before launch.
Will it work on my stack?
It's being built hosting-independent — a layer in front of the app (edge worker / reverse proxy / middleware), designed for the serverless and dynamic stacks where crawler bills actually happen: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, AWS, or your own server.
Why not just use Cloudflare?
If free bot-fight modes solve your problem, use them — genuinely. AgentShield is for when they don't: when the expensive thing isn't that a bot visited, but what each visit cost you, and you want a dollar cap enforced per agent, per route.
Who's building this?
Andrew Hsu, a solo founder building in public. The research behind this page — 41 cited sources, including the incident reports quoted above — is being published with the launch posts, not hidden.