Did this guy just write a blog post about how he completely rewrote a functional feature to save $800?

In all seriousness, the devil is in the details around this kind of stuff, but I do worry that doing something not even clever, but just nonstandard, introduces a larger maintenance effort than necessary.

Interesting problem, and an interesting solution, but I'd probably rather just throw money at it until it gets to a scale that merits further bot prevention measures.