My app didn't go "viral". My AWS bill did.

And by viral I mean from $0 to $31. Umami told me Clew Directive got 14 visits last month. AWS told me I owed $31 for it. That works out to $2.21 a visitor, which would make it the most expensive free learning-path tool in California. Spoiler alert: 14 visitors, $31, and not a single one of them was the reason. Something was off. Here is how Amazon Q, Claude, and a few hours of reading my own code untangled it. The app turned out to be innocent. What Clew Directive is, quickly A free, stateless tool that builds you a personalized AI learning-path PDF. You take a 60-second Vibe Check, four questions about your goals and how you learn, and it maps you to free, verified resources and hands you a briefing. No accounts, no database, no paywall, nothing stored about you. It runs on Amazon Nova, which is why it costs close to nothing to operate, which is also why a $31 bill made no sense. The name is the Theseus kind of clew. A ball of thread to find your way out of the maze. Less hype, more direction. Live at clewdirective.com . The number that didn't add up Twelve visitors, 14 visits, 93% bounce, average session about a minute. Referrers from Bing, Google, Yahoo, GitHub. Visitors from the US, India, Netherlands, Egypt, Ethiopia, Singapore. Mostly crawlers stopping by to say hello. A few curious humans and a parade of bots is not a $31 month. So either every visit was doing something enormous, or the bill was never about visits at all. The dashboard lied, politely. An Amazon Q Story My cost tracker said Clew Directive was running on Claude Sonnet. Sonnet is the expensive one. Case closed, right? I opened the repo. Clew Directive does not run Sonnet. The Navigator agent runs Amazon Nova 2 Lite. Scout and Curator run Nova Micro. The IAM policy is scoped to Nova ARNs only, so a Sonnet call from these functions would come back AccessDenied. The app physically cannot bill Sonnet. The math agreed. A full learning-path generation on Nova costs about two-tenths of a cent. Fourtee