A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
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Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#2I think Firebase was kind of douchebags assuming the story is correct, if you change how people are billed you should give people time to adjust their software.
Stuff like that makes me want to host everything myself as it will for sure be the cheapest option.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#3Look to stories like this before you go 'serverless' in your organization.
Building on top of a proprietary stack with no guarantees on pricing and future availability will lead here.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#4Yet another example that Google so far doesn't get the public cloud and may have hard time to catch up with Amazon Web Services.
E.g. shutdown Prediction APIs, charge 70x, not enough support.
I believe Google got much better tech than AWS, but the culture, support and strategy has blind spots.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#5I think Firebase was kind of douchebags assuming the story is correct, if you change how people are billed you should give people time to adjust their software. Stuff like that makes me want to host everything myself as it will for sure be the cheapest option.
Hosting by yourself is always the safest long-term solution, even if you are hosting it in the cloud, you at least protect yourself from this "Company reserves the right to change the TOS at any time..."
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#6Using Firebase or similar is akin to opening a restaurant that serves take-away pizzas from a nearby Pizza Hut, after nicely putting them in a porcelain plate.
If Pizza Hut changes the pricing, you either close shop or adapt.
Who would open such a restaurant?
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#7Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve are huge.
Also, I do love Bezos mantra of always becoming cheaper over time. That is the core of Amazon's brand. Whereas Oracle, IBM, and the old guard always make you pot committed and charge an arm and a leg, the Amazon guys will leave money on the table. That is how you earn trust.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#8I am so surprised why people buy into some SAAS software that does simple things instead of hiring 2 programmers from cheap location (somewhere between India and Poland western border), getting Hetzner VPS or dedicates server (even the second option is cheap, including a few administrator hours) and be done.
It is not so hard to predict failure/buy out of some SAAS provider, it happened so many times. I am curious why Venture Capital investors are not looking at that problem closely.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#9Look to stories like this before you go 'serverless' in your organization. Building on top of a proprietary stack with no guarantees on pricing and future availability will lead here.
It doesn't sound like it's the 'serverless' hosting that is their issue, rather that they have no direct control over the endpoint that their difficult to upgrade client software is hitting. They actually fix it in future versions of the client software by putting controllable serverless endpoints in front of the firebase endpoints they're hitting, so if something like this occurs again they could just change their endpoint to not hit the third-party resource that is costing them so much money.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#10I find it hard to reconcile this suggestion at the bottom of the article
> Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path!
- Build without depending on external services
- You can do this by depending on this external service