What is Real Problem AI?

Real Problem AI is a curated directory of 100 real problems worth building an AI startup around. Each problem is scored honestly on severity, AI feasibility, market signal, and competition gap. We're for builders looking for what to build, not for ethics debates about AI.

What is the difference between Real Problem AI and AI ethics or AI risks indexes?

Real Problem AI catalogues problems AI can solve: productive, commercial opportunities for builders. AI ethics indexes catalogue problems with AI itself (bias, environmental cost, copyright, consciousness). Different intent, different audience: founders and indie hackers vs researchers and policy folks.

What should I build with AI in 2026?

Look for problems with high severity (it costs people hours, sleep, or revenue every week), high AI feasibility (LLMs, vision or voice are great at this today), strong market signal (Reddit threads + willingness to pay), and a clear competition gap (incumbents miss the same obvious thing). Real Problem AI scores 100 such problems for you on those four axes.

Where do Real Problem AI's startup ideas come from?

From three sources, scanned each cycle: 1) Reddit threads where people describe a real friction in their own words, 2) podcasts and talks of founders young builders trust (Nikhil Kamath, Aman Gupta, Ankur Warikoo, Raj Shamani, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Isenberg), and 3) a continuous 1,000+ source scan covering forums, app store reviews, regulator filings, and field interviews.

Is Real Problem AI free?

Yes. Browsing every problem, opening every score breakdown, raising your hand on a co-founder match, and the founder vault are all free. There is no paywall.

How is each problem scored?

Four axes, each 1-10, weighted: Problem Severity (30%), AI Feasibility (25%), Market Signal (25%), Competition Gap (20%). Weighted average is the Opportunity Score on each card. Only problems clearing 7.0+ make the live list.

Why is an AI crawler multiplying my hosting bill with no human visitors?

Small sites on usage-billed hosting are seeing crawlers hit the same pages millions of times, routed through residential proxies and even creating accounts, and the first sign is a hosting bill ten times higher than normal that the host will not waive.

Category: AI / Agents · Trend: AI Infra · Opportunity score: 7.9 / 10

What is the “Why is an AI crawler multiplying my hosting bill with no human visitors?” problem in 2026?

Who has this problem?

Indie developers and small SaaS teams hosting public content on usage-billed platforms like Vercel.

Recorded source context

Dataset source note: Facebook’s crawler requested the same pages over 3 million times in 2 days

This note may summarize the referenced material rather than quote it verbatim. Source label: Ask HN thread on out-of-control AI bot traffic, 14 September 2026, plus a separate HN post two days later on a Meta crawler causing a 10x Vercel bill. (primary source).

Existing players in this space

Cloudflare Bot Management: Strong bot scoring, but the poster still could not stop proxied scrapers with it.
Vercel Firewall and BotID: Platform bot controls that need tuning before the bill arrives, not after.
robots.txt: Ignored by the crawlers that cause the damage.
CAPTCHAs such as Turnstile and hCaptcha: Add friction for real users and were bypassed by account-creating bots in the thread.

What existing players are missing

A spend-aware bot guard that watches request patterns against the hosting bill in real time, separates crawlers from people and user-directed agents by behaviour rather than user agent, and caps or serves a cheap cached view before costs spike.

How Real Problem AI scores this opportunity

Aggregate score: 7.9 / 10. Four-axis rubric:

Problem severity: 9 / 10
AI feasibility today: 8 / 10
Market signal: 8 / 10
Competition gap: 6 / 10

How to build a solution: stack hints

Edge middleware request logging
Behavioural ML classification of traffic
Hosting cost API integration and alerts
Rate limiting and cheap crawler views