BotBlock for Indie Publishers
A one-click bot-defence service for small blogs, niche news sites, and independent journals that stops residential-proxy scrapers before they eat your bandwidth, without forcing real readers through CAPTCHA walls.
Independent writers, niche news sites, and small publishers whose content is being scraped into AI training data
- Drop-in reverse proxy that filters known scraper botnets while letting real readers through untouched
- Reader-friendly challenge that asks one contextual question only when traffic looks suspicious
- Clean traffic analytics that separates real humans from bot hits so you finally know your real audience size
- Alerts when a new residential-proxy network starts hammering your site, with one-click block
The LWN update confirms scraper traffic from residential proxy networks is getting worse, and indie publishers have no good off-the-shelf defence; a tool purpose-built for small sites is missing.
Direct, named pain: LinkedIn piece on 'The Hidden Cost of AI Scraping for Independent Publishers' plus the LWN attack story confirm indie publishers are paying real bandwidth/infrastructure costs; Anubis was literally built 'to help protect the small internet' from this exact problem, validating the demand curve.The Hidden Cost of AI Scraping for Independent Publishers ↗these AI scrapers suck - lwn.net ↗
Whitespace is far narrower than it appeared: Anubis is an open-source PoW bot firewall purpose-built for small sites, Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers by default plus offers Pay-Per-Crawl, AlternativeTo lists 12+ Anubis alternatives, and Moonito reviews 5+ WordPress bot-protection plugins — the 'one-click for indie publishers' slot is already crowded.Anubis Alternatives: Top 12 Bot Protection Services & Similar Apps ↗Anubis - GitHub (Web AI Firewall Utility for small sites) ↗
Indie publishers report being squeezed by bandwidth costs and have low budgets; the closest competitor (Anubis) is free/open-source and Cloudflare's AI crawler blocking is on the free tier, plus a free Pay-Per-Crawl experiment — willingness to pay exists but price ceiling and conversion are weak against a free baseline.Pay up or stop scraping: Cloudflare program charges bots for each crawl ↗WordPress Bot Protection: 5 Best Plugins + API Solutions Compared ↗
Scraper pressure will keep rising, but the largest threat to longevity is Cloudflare solving this at the network/edge layer for free; a small-publisher-only SaaS risks being squeezed out by infra-level defaults or absorbed into Anubis-style OSS, capping defensibility.Content Independence Day, one year on: building an agentic internet - Cloudflare Blog ↗How Much Does It Cost to Scrape the Web at Scale? ↗
Technically very buildable: Anubis already demonstrates PoW + TLS fingerprinting + cheap reverse-proxy deployment for small sites, and the 'no CAPTCHA walls for humans' promise is exactly Anubis's design constraint — main work is packaging, billing, and one-click onboarding rather than novel detection.I made Anubis, a lightweight, open-source Web Application Firewall designed to block automated bot attacks without frustrating real users ↗