Our Videos Silently Failed for a Week — How a Stale Env Var Cost Us $60 and 12 Unhappy Users

You know that sinking feeling when you check your billing dashboard and something doesn't add up? That's how this started. I noticed RepoClip — my AI video generation SaaS — was burning through $20/day on fal.ai credits for three consecutive days. My first thought was optimistic: "Great, more users are trying the product!" I was wrong. The money was being spent. The videos were being generated. But not a single user was getting their finished video . The Symptom: $60 Burned, Zero Videos Delivered RepoClip generates promotional videos from GitHub repos. The pipeline looks like this: GitHub URL → Gemini Analysis → Kling Video Clips (fal.ai) → Remotion Lambda Render → Done Each "Video Short" generates 5 AI video clips using Kling 3.0 Pro on fal.ai, then stitches them together with narration using Remotion on AWS Lambda. When I checked the fal.ai dashboard, I saw $20/day being consumed on March 7, 8, and 9. That's roughly 2–4 video generations per day. Seemed plausible for organic traffic.