Nine locales, no middleware: route groups as a Cloudflare billing decision

The arithmetic does not hold, even though the conclusion mostly does. Cloudflare bills per request and next-intl middleware runs on every request ^[5], so middleware invocations for a page load track requests, not the size of the locale table. One visitor pulling `/zh/gameplay` is one request whether the project ships two languages or ninety ^[9]. The author's "9x the middleware invocations for every page load" ^[6] is not what those two facts produce. The saving on offer is one invocation per request going to zero, which is a real saving and a smaller story than the multiplier suggests.

It is also an unpriced one. The post carries no invocation counts, no Workers pricing tier, and no before-and-after bill ^[7], so the motivation stays a stated preference rather than a measured result.

What the pattern definitely costs is structure. The directory listing shows `gameplay/` and `characters/` under both `(root)` and `[locale]` ^[12], so the route tree exists twice and every new page has to be created in both places. Shared view components absorb most of that, since the same component renders all nine languages and only the message file changes ^[13]. The locale list is the part that leaks: it is hardcoded in `generateStaticParams` and again in `sitemap.ts` ^[14], two arrays that have to be edited together when a tenth language arrives.

The sitemap is worth counting, because the post does not. Five paths at 0.8 priority for English, plus eight locales times five paths at 0.7 ^[15], is 45 URLs ^[16] from one build with zero runtime locale detection ^[8].

The `safeLoad` helper is the most honest thing in the post. It wraps `t.raw()` in a try/catch and a shape check so a section renders only when the translation actually exists ^[10]. That is not defensive habit, it is a consequence of the content pipeline: the strings were scraped out of the game's official nine-language gameplay guide with a Python script rather than translated ^[11], and scraped coverage is ragged by nature. The null check is load-bearing structure standing in for the missing content.

The other borrowed asset is heavier. Screenshots are referenced straight off FromSoftware's own CDN, under a path containing `networktest`, with no local copies ^[17]. The author calls that CDN fast and reliable ^[17], which it presumably is right up to the point where a finished network test stops needing its image directory.

Strip the billing story out and the technique still stands on its own for any site whose locale set is fixed at build time and whose default language deserves the bare root. English on `/gameplay`, everything else prefixed ^[4], nine static variants out of one OpenNext build ^[18]. The price is a duplicated tree and the loss of any server-side guess about who the visitor is.