Animations with receipts: publishing the cost of every component

The most common complaint about animated component libraries isn't about the animations. It's about what they smuggle in: a hero effect that quietly ships hundreds of kilobytes of 3D runtime, a text reveal that janks the main thread, a "subtle" background that ignores prefers-reduced-motion entirely.

The demos never show any of that. Demos are free; costs are hidden.

What we publish

Starting today, every component page in the Velora docs shows three numbers before you install:

• Gzipped source size — measured from the actual file that lands in your project, not the minified library bundle.
• Dependency count — most Velora components depend on nothing at all; the rest declare Motion and nothing else.
• Reduced-motion behavior — every component is covered by a global CSS kill switch, and the badge is a contract, not a claim.

The numbers are generated at build time by the same script that builds the registry, so they can't drift from the code:

pnpm registry:build
# -> public/r/*.json + component stats + llms.txt

Why this matters more in 2026

AI agents now install components on your behalf. When an agent picks a hero section from a registry, nobody eyeballs the import list first — the cost shows up later, in the Lighthouse report of a page you shipped.

Machine-readable receipts fix the incentive: if every registry item declared its weight, agents could optimize for it, and "looks great in the demo" would stop being the only selection pressure.

We'd love for this to become boring, standard practice. Until then, the receipts are on every component page.