← /daily-startup-idea
June 21, 2026

Throttle

“Rate limits for the people who love you. Mom hit her quota by 10am. Boss is in exponential backoff. The group chat is degraded. You’re not ghosting — you’re protecting your SLOs.”

The Problem

You receive 437 unsolicited inputs per dayacross seven channels with zero admission control. Mom calls during standup. Your ex texts at 1:47am. Your group chat has been named “BRUNCH ???” for nine months and nobody has gone to brunch. There is no circuit breaker. There is only you — returning 200 OK to everyone, and lying.

The Solution

A rate-limiting proxy in front of your entire social graph. Set sliding-window quotas per sender, per channel, per time-of-day. Boss gets bursty traffic. Mom gets a hard cap at 3 RPM. Cousin Brad gets a shadowban (we 200 him, then drop the payload to /dev/null).

throttle.you / inbound
14 active · 4 throttled
MOM
THROTTLED
BOSS
OK
TARA (ex)
BLOCKED
GC_BRUNCH_???
DEGRADED
LINKEDIN_RECRUITER_07
403
DAD
OK
BRAD (cousin)
SHADOW

Status Codes

We extended HTTP with a few semantics specific to people who love you.

200
OKHeard. Processed. Will not respond.
202
Accepted“ok sounds good!” (queued, never run)
204
No ContentLeft on read.
304
Not Modified“k”
401
Unauthorized“new phone who dis”
418
I’m a teapotMom asked your salary.
429
Too Many RequestsTara texted again.
451
Unavailable for Legal ReasonsRestraining order in effect.
503
Service Unavailable“sorry phone died” (it did not)
504
Gateway Timeout“omg just saw this!!” (12 days)

The Backoff Curve

When mom retries, we exponentially back her off. By call #6 she gets a polite tone for six hours.

0s
#1
30s
#2
2m
#3
10m
#4
1hr
#5
6hr
#6
retry attempt → cooldown duration

Pricing

Hobby
free
$0
1 quota policy. 5 contacts. Manual circuit breaker (you throw the phone).
Pro
default
$14 / mo
Unlimited policies. Sliding window. Priority queue for emergencies (defined narrowly).
Enterprise
founders’ pick
talk to sales
Multi-region (mom on EST). Dedicated SRE (your therapist). Private endpoint: a flip phone.

TAM

Total addressable unsolicited inputs
8B people on Earth × $14 ARPU × 12 mo
= $1.34T / yr
Mom alone is a unicorn.

The Ask

$4M seed. Goes to: a GPU farm to classify “is this an emergency or is it Karen,” and a satellite phone for when your mother triggers a region-wide outage.

Series A pitch:“We’re Cloudflare, but in front of your group chat.”