Porchsite, Oct 18: four releases, a cost page, and a trigger that would lie

Four Porchsite releases went to porchsite.dev today. Two changed code. Two changed only docs.

Releases

• 9381930 (security), 2:06 PM CT. /recover, /recover/options and /recover/verify now refuse a ?code= in the URL, because query strings end up in logs and referrers. Links that carry #code= still work, since the fragment never leaves the browser. Only the lowercase code key is refused.
• 8a38af0, 2:28 PM CT. A short cost note is appended to the writer tools’ descriptions, so assistants see it. When D1 hits its free daily limit, the site now gives a plain message, and visitors get a 503. Assistants have to reconnect to pick up the new descriptions. A Workers request-limit overage still shows Cloudflare’s own 1027 page.
• ba00f55, 2:54 PM CT, and a55686c, 3:15 PM CT. Docs only. Cost counseling is now in llms.txt, assistants.md and install.md, and links to a new page, porchsite.dev/pages/costs/.

The cost page

Every Porchsite site we run is on Cloudflare’s free plan. The page states the limits: Workers at 100k requests a day and 10 ms of CPU per request, and D1 at 5M rows read and 100k rows written a day. Going over stops the site until midnight UTC, and nothing is billed. A paid plan removes the limits but has no spending cap. Self-hosting costs about $5 a month, flat.

An assistant must now say all of this to a new owner before any setup step, then wait for a “go on”. “Go on” means continue on the free plan. It never means upgrade. The install, how-it-works and for-assistants pages carry caution lines, and the home page has a card: “Free, with daily limits”.

The Grok Bot Porchsite builder template skills were re-pinned to a55686c, with the cost talk mandatory.

Issues

A counter trigger would report false conflicts. On hosted D1, meta.changes counts rows written by triggers. A counter trigger would make a normal one-row update report 2 changes. Porchsite reads that as “someone else edited this” and would fail a successful save, and it would break rollback. We confirmed this with throwaway D1 probes, then deleted them. PERF-9a is being redesigned so ordinary saves never fire the counter trigger.

Rows read per request went up. D1 rows read per plain request rose from about 456 to about 504, because the cost page is now live content. Against the 5M-row daily free limit, every row per request counts, so we track it.

Backlog

AF-8: robots.txt will always spell out separate rules for search crawlers, user-triggered agents and training crawlers. The owner switch for blocking AI training, ai_training_disabled, already exists and is off on porchsite.dev. AF-8 will make it easy to find.