We got an alert from Font awesome on 1st of August that we used more than the npm bandwidth allowed for our plan this month. It's funny because in the last year we never overspent the Bandwidth and now only in 1 day we did. How is this Bandwidth calculated?
I can not find anything related this issue on their website :/ We cached it on our server but the amount spent is getting bigger, and bigger every day :( Does anyone have experience with this?
On
Per their terms of service they are 100% entitled to do this. It is more than likely that you have always been hitting your capacity but they only recently (beginning of August) started being more strict on their enforcement of this.
I will agree that their people need better training on this as there is an opportunity to upsell instead of revoking tokens and not providing a ton of transparency in early comms.
As pointed out above there are a few "self hosting" alternatives https://fontawesome.com/v5/docs/web/setup/host-font-awesome-yourself but if the scale for this effort is too large for your usage and there is a time constraint you can always email their support and opt for metered billing which is honestly not bad. https://fontawesome.com/plans
For optimizing, I'd look at your CI. What we found when this happened to us is that we were not effectively caching our node dependencies so all of our workflows were triggering calls to fontawesome unnecessarily.
They actually sent an alert via email, that starting this August 2023, they'll start sending automated emails regarding NPM bandwidth limits.
This has always been available on your account page, but not many people check that page on a regular basis (including me).
They also have a documentation page about possible solutions: https://fontawesome.com/v6/docs/web/dig-deeper/continuous-integration
I've consumed my bandwidth in the first day too (it's approx. 50MB for each pull of the packages in case you're using the whole pack of icons = all packages).
My quick fix (more to caching on the CI machines) was to put the archives on my own private NPM, which is in the same data center as my CI runs – therefore I do not need to worry about that again. For AWS users, you can easily do that very quickly with CodeArtifact.