# How Nous Research used BotID to block automated abuse at scale By Steven Van · 2025-11-07 Nous Research used Vercel's BotID to stop a 3,000% traffic spike from bots exploiting its free Hermes chat tier. When Nous Research made its open-source model Hermes free for a week, automated scripts overwhelmed the service, spreading high-volume inference requests across thousands of fake accounts to bypass rate limits. Cloudflare Turnstile was already in place on sign-up, but bulk account creation continued, wasting inference compute and inflating identity provider bills. Before reopening any free tier, Nous adopted [Vercel]()'s BotID Deep Analysis at two checkpoints: before and after sign-up or sign-in, and inside the chat UI itself, where a heartbeat mechanism triggers periodic BotID checks via tRPC and caches successful checks briefly so inference only proceeds after a recent human verification. When Nous quietly reopened the free tier on 16 October without any promotion, BotID detected a coordinated attack within days that pushed traffic up 3,000%. Five to six IPs generated most of the load, mostly from Japan, with 3 to 4 distinct JA4 hashes recurring across attempts. The attack lasted about two hours before attackers gave up, and inference traffic and availability stayed stable throughout. Enterprise and Pro teams can use [BotID Deep Analysis]() free of charge through 15 January. [![]()]() ![Vercel]() Vercel The platform for frontend developers — deploy, preview, and scale web apps and AI agents with zero config. [View Vercel →]() [Original source]() [Read How Nous Research used BotID to block automated abuse at scale on Creators Toolbox]() --- Canonical source: https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/vercel-how-nous-research-used-botid-to-block-automated-abuse-at-scale