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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

#21

Post by beambot »

IanCal wrote: post #12
DomBlack wrote: post #11

> 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! Isn't using AWS Lamba as your gateway, trapping you into using a specific service, just as much as firebase was?

Sounds so to me, all that takes is lambda changing how they charge and suddenly your hard-coded app is stuck again.

Solution here is to make sure all api endpoints and URLs used in your code (eg into services such as lambda) get mapped through a domain that you can control / change via DNS. Then you can always cut off a service or redirect all requests to a different endpoint of your choosing (eg another serverless system or your own backend). This is better than hardcoding an unalterable endpoint / url / domain in your code that is beyond your own control, and it is doubly important if updating code on your product is difficult or impossible.

Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

#24

Post by apatters »

Wowow! In this position my first step would be to determine if there's any legal basis for disputing the charge (an informal conversation with a lawyer or even just someone who's been through a similar experience is a fine start). Even when a billing change is disclosed in advance and the customer actually uses the bandwidth, massive spikes in metered pricing are a tricky area and have attracted the attention of regulators in the past--for instance telecoms have come under fire by charging sky-high overage fees for mobile data and not warning you until you've already racked up a few extra zeroes worth of charges on your next bill.

Also, immediately dispute the charge with your credit card company, as you want this on their radar. Their interests are aligned with yours to at least some degree (if Google's causing financial distress for one of their customers with thousands of dollars in unanticipated charges, how many others may get hit?).

Aside from that, if things played out as described: major dick move, Google! Is "do no evil" a bad joke these days? Seriously, though, Google is not a dumb company and my guess is that if the right person was made aware of this case (e.g., anyone who understands that the most important word in "customer relationship" is the second one), they would make it right.

I'm totally on the side of the author: when possible, it's worth a little extra elbow grease to build your business on top of free, self-hosted software instead of proprietary SaaS. Think of it as insurance against cases like this one.

Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

#26

Post by Buge »

alexfi wrote: post #17

> They said in most cases it doesn’t make a big difference… unless you use the REST API. So in the end it was a coding problem, because you forgot to add Keep-Alive = true? If you use the provided SDK's it should be no problem then right?

I don't think Keep-Alive = true would be enough. The article also mentions TLS session tickets would be necessary.

And it's hard to call this a coding problem if the requirements of the API never specified that session tickets and keep alive were necessary.

Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

#28

Post by Aeolun »

flipp3r wrote: post #14

Reminds me of getting Bait-and-Switch'd by Google App Engine in 2011. From 10's of euros to 1000's. > They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options. Sounds like Google did a great job with Firebase. Definitely gives you that Google-feel of unresponsi…

Jup, had the same issue with Google App Engine. Luckily I could contact support...

"What do you mean, you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!"

Fun times.

Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

#30

Post by imron »

apatters wrote: post #24

Wowow! In this position my first step would be to determine if there's any legal basis for disputing the charge (an informal conversation with a lawyer or even just someone who's been through a similar experience is a fine start). Even when a billing change is disclosed in advance and the customer actually uses the bandwidth, massive spikes in metered pricing are a tricky area and have attracted the attention of regu…

> immediately dispute the charge with your credit card company

This will result in the shutdown of their service, and ruin their app.

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