diff --git a/docs/gallery-dl.md b/docs/gallery-dl.md
index c6e13a1..e35469d 100644
--- a/docs/gallery-dl.md
+++ b/docs/gallery-dl.md
@@ -14,6 +14,72 @@ map 1:1 onto our sidecar directory layout (`posts`, `reels`, `stories`,
 `highlights`). Rolling our own would mean reimplementing the ban-sensitive part
 by hand.
 
+## The account was suspended on 2026-08-17 — read this first
+
+The account used for all of the below was suspended the same day this tooling
+was built, for "activity that doesn't follow our Community Standards on spam".
+The fetching was not the expensive part. **Verification was.**
+
+What was actually spent against `instagram.com` in a few hours, from one
+session and one IP:
+
+| activity | rough requests | downloaded |
+|---|---:|---|
+| enumerating a profile grid by scrolling it in an automated browser | ~18 pages | nothing |
+| the same profile again, after a bug in the scraping selector | ~18 pages | nothing |
+| a Reels tab enumerated the same way | ~9 pages | nothing |
+| full `-j` metadata dumps of one profile, twice | ~16 pages | nothing |
+| `--simulate` runs over the same profile, three times | ~24 pages | nothing |
+| single-post `/p/<code>/` fetches while testing filename formats | ~8 | a handful |
+| an aborted sync that re-ran every listing pass before dying | ~40 pages | ~270 MB |
+| the real sync, 24 sources across 6 profiles | ~150 pages | 2.2 GB |
+
+The two rows that actually mattered to the archive are the last one and part of
+the second-to-last. **Everything above them produced no files at all**, and
+together they were a comparable number of requests.
+
+The warnings arrived in this order and were each rationalised:
+
+1. `429 Too Many Requests` from `scontent-*.cdninstagram.com`, losing two
+   videos. Treated as a pacing problem — pacing was lowered and the run
+   continued.
+2. `400 Bad Request` from `/api/v1/highlights/<id>/highlights_tray/`, on an
+   endpoint that had worked hours earlier. Correctly read as a possible block;
+   requests stopped.
+3. Suspension.
+
+**Treat the first CDN 429 as a stop signal for the session, not a tuning
+parameter.** It is the tolerant surface complaining; if that surface is
+complaining, the rate-limited one has been unhappy for a while.
+
+### Rules that follow from this
+
+- **Count verification requests against the same budget as fetching.** A
+  `--simulate`, a `-j` dump and a browser scroll all hit `instagram.com` and
+  download nothing. Being read-only does not make them free; it makes them
+  invisible, which is worse.
+- **Never enumerate the live site with an automated browser.** Scrolling a
+  214-post grid is ~18 paginated GraphQL loads at machine speed with no dwell
+  time between them. It is the most obviously non-human thing in this whole
+  document, and it was done here twice on one profile.
+- **Verify against the archive, not against Instagram.** Every naming, dating
+  and classification question answered in this file could have been answered
+  from files already on disk plus a single listing pass.
+- **`probe_live` is not cached, so every restart re-enumerates everything.**
+  The aborted run cost a full duplicate set of listing passes for five
+  profiles. Cache probe output to disk before running anything twice.
+- **Budget per session, not per command.** Nothing in the tooling knows what
+  the last command spent.
+
+### For a replacement account
+
+- Let it exist and be used normally for a while before pointing any tool at it.
+- Keep the cookie on one machine and one public IP, as before.
+- Start with a single small profile and stop for the day afterwards.
+- Prefer Instagram's own "Download a copy" export where possible: it is
+  first-party, costs no scraping requests, and carries the metadata this whole
+  document works around not having.
+
 ## The safety model — read this before changing any option
 
 The ban vector is **requests to `instagram.com`**, not bandwidth. See
diff --git a/docs/jdownloader.md b/docs/jdownloader.md
index 3f61988..c94b733 100644
--- a/docs/jdownloader.md
+++ b/docs/jdownloader.md
@@ -18,7 +18,23 @@ Concretely, from this archive: `rivvsofficial` has 188 post-metadata files, so
 backfilling it cost 188 API requests for one 605-file profile. That's the ban
 vector. Downloading the 238 photos was never the problem.
 
-Instaloader got this account banned once. JDownloader with throttling has not.
+Instaloader got this account banned once. JDownloader with throttling did not.
+
+> **The account was suspended anyway, on 2026-08-17, for "spam".** Not by
+> JDownloader, and not by downloading. It was suspended during a day of
+> *building and verifying* the gallery-dl replacement — automated browser
+> scrolling to enumerate profile grids, repeated `--simulate` and `-j` metadata
+> passes, and one aborted sync that re-ran every listing pass before dying.
+>
+> The framing above is right about which surface is dangerous and wrong about
+> what reaches it. **Every read of `instagram.com` counts, including the ones
+> that download nothing** — and read-only work is easy not to count precisely
+> because it leaves no files behind. See the post-mortem at the top of
+> `docs/gallery-dl.md`.
+>
+> The rule that would have prevented it: *verify against the archive, never
+> against the live site*, and treat the first CDN `429` as the end of the
+> session rather than a pacing knob.
 
 ### What the metadata gap actually costs