Usage in Builder.io being severly misleaded by lighthouse speed test made automatically by Shopify

[Ecommfox]

Hello, I think we’re going to face serious difficulties :
We are a Shopify Partner agency and we deliver storefronts to clients using builder AI. Yet for a majority of our client we host ourselves and we maintain their storefront in our environments on our Builder account . However we want to upgrade progressively only when the actual stores start having customers and need a higher plan .
But the issue is that since the usage is based off 100k monthly visual views, and each page visit is counted as a view regardless if they are human or not, we quickly reach the threshold of 100K because Shopify runs frequent speed report using a Google Developer tool (the Google data centre is based in Council Bluffs, USA) which tests 3 pages, Homepage, a popular collection page and a popular product page, each of them count as views and Shopify runs this daily —.

I think we need a distinction made by non human sessions and real human sessions because this is really really damaging our working progress. For example we have even release a Shopify store yet , which is still in development more, our developpers can not make any more changes because we’ve been hit by the plan limit.

I would like to discuss further with the support’s staff because I don’t see any workaround to this issue. Shopify apparently does not want to give control to their users on these automatic speed testing option, and It also messes up our traffic tracking results .

Thank you for taking this in consideration and I’m looking forward to discuss about this to find a solution.

Joaquim

[sheema]

Hey @Ecommfox , thanks so much for sharing the detailed context here — I can see how frustrating this must be, especially when you’re still in the development phase and haven’t even launched the store yet.

We totally understand your concern around Shopify’s automated speed tests inflating the visual views and impacting your ability to continue building. As you’ve mentioned, Shopify runs Lighthouse tests daily across three key pages, and these tests do count towards Builder’s usage since the pages are genuinely being rendered and served through our Content API.

We’ve discussed this internally, and while we understand it’s not ideal, filtering out these views (based on IP or user-agent) isn’t something we’d want to support at the moment. Even though the views come from automated tools, they still trigger real content loads and API usage on Builder’s side.

Really appreciate you bringing this up and helping us better understand the edge cases that affect teams like yours. We’ll keep an eye on this and continue improving how usage is handled for dev environments.