The demo frontend now builds only from the release branch. Previously each of the ~44 daily commits to main triggered a full rebuild, ~100 of which per week were redundant.
An Ignored Build Step gates the Vercel project to the release branch, while the backend continues to auto-deploy on main pushes. Shipping the frontend is now an explicit push of main to release.
The change cut roughly 100 builds a week and about $117 a month, a quarter of which had been spent on failed or canceled builds.