In April, Vibe hit a wall I hadn’t designed for: Spotify’s rate limits.
Everything worked on my desk. Then every phone, every open dashboard and my own testing started counting against the same bar’s account. I hit the limit five times in five weeks. Spotify blocked the account for hours at a time, then banned one outright, and I had to buy another Premium subscription to keep going.
I was challenging myself a lot on this one, and the limits pushed back every time.
For years an API was something I left to engineering. This time it shaped the product: how often a screen updates, and what one more guest costs.
The fix was simple once I saw it, and it’s on the Vibe page. The lesson stayed with me: when you build on a service you don’t own, its limits are part of the design.