Double my salary and we'll talk. Include my travel time in my working hours or I'll do it anyway.
But also I took a fully remote position to not have to deal with the return to office stuff so realistically nothing would get me back to an office.
I had my instance open for signups without a captcha. It ballooned to 1k "users" in a 6 hour period before implementing the captcha. I think that's probably what happened here.
I had the same issue with spam accounts being created and ended up logging into postgres and deleting user accounts that didn't have a verified email. My instance is very fresh though and doesn't have a ton of non-me users so I could safely delete them. Once I enabled captcha and deleted those accounts I don't have issues with user counts.
This is my guess too. Bayonet seems like it's probably pretty complicated to add.
I believe it's always free. I've used it for the last year and haven't paid a penny.