If every user is collecting 36mb a day like in the story here, your droplet wouldn’t even be capable of serving 500 users a month without hitting your bandwidth limit. With their current rates, your one million requests would cost you around 10 million USD.
That's ridiculously big quantity of data to serve a seldomly updated blog just because the client doesn't want (or know how, or think about) to implement an easy and old http method.
Imagine the petabytes of data transferred through the internet saved if a couple RSS clients added that method.
Yeah, but also... if RSS readers behaved correctly, it would be 512 kb. (170 kb with gzip, if she didn't enable it like you imply – I'm too lazy to check, but I assumed it was on.)
I think making clients behave correctly is much more sustainable solution, although we could do better than doing so at the cost of the end users.
Yews, it's about enforcing their preference on how others should interact with OP's published site feed, on principle. Which is always an uphill battle.
It's about enforcing that people follow standards. Which is still an uphill battle, but at least it's based in something sane. Their work on this has resulted in improvements to a whole slew of popular feed readers that should make life easier for a chunk of the internet, not just OP's own site.
Sounds like you don't know how to scale for cheap.
And since I've ran integrations that connected over 500 companies. I know what a rouge client actually looks like and 72 requests per day and I wouldn't even notice.