The article explains that they were using the old Vercel price and that the new price is much cheaper.
> On Feb 18, 2025, just a few days after we published this blog post, Vercel changed their image optimization pricing. With the new pricing we'd not have faced a huge bill.
The ".localhost" TLD has traditionally been statically defined in
host DNS implementations as having an A record pointing to the
loop back IP address and is reserved for such use
The RFC 8375 suggestion (*.home.arpa) allows for more than a single host in the domain. If not in name/feeling, but the strictest readings [and adherence] too.
Both offer a free plan but Package Phobia is sponsored meaning its on the paid plan but getting it for free.
Kinda like a skateboarder might be sponsored and get a skateboard for free even though others pay for the same item.
Package Phobia started out on the free plan but it turns out its quite popular, serving over 5 million requests per month. A cache miss (which is frequent given the cardinality of packages + versions), it can take 30 seconds to install a package and measure its size.
There's also a public API which tools like Socket use to check the size of every npm package.
> On Feb 18, 2025, just a few days after we published this blog post, Vercel changed their image optimization pricing. With the new pricing we'd not have faced a huge bill.