Google is famous for not having any humans in support. One robot will write abuse on you and another robot will happily oblige and ban you with no appellation possible. Building whole business on one of such platforms takes some "courage" :) .
A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
31–40 of 516 posts
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#32Yet 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.
> I believe Google got much better tech than AWS
I get the impression Google is doing a lot of things different for the sake of doing things differently. AWS is much more pragmatic and transparent.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#33> 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.
Yeah it's no coding problem on purpose, but sth you could actually fix. But it's not good manner to not mention it from Firebase.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#34Pricing 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 a…
> the Amazon guys will leave money on the table
What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit, there's lot of thought that goes into their pricing and you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#35Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive (this applies to both Operational Transform and Differential Synchronization approaches).
The price of Firebase was probably kept artificially low to attract new users but this was a ticking timebomb.
Those people/companies who are using Firebase as their primary database are going to suffer now.
It should really only be used for specific applications where datasync makes sense such as collaborative text editing.
I wouldn't even recommend using it for chat because it's really easy for the complexity to get out of hand there and you can usually achieve similar results using a combination of pub/sub and REST.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#36Reminds 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.
"you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!"
What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere?
Would you recommend against using GAE?
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#37Did a Firebase team member already comment on this? In a few hours Google will present some new Firebase features at io17, and I would expect them to avoid bad press now as much as possible...
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#38Pricing 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 a…
> the Amazon guys will leave money on the table What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit, there's lot of thought that goes into their pricing and you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money.
„...you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money...“
Is exactly what the parent comment said...
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#39Look 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 e…
The more general problem with serverless architectures that this post illustrates is that you're essentially running on a series of FAAS/SAAS style services which can change their billing at any time.
So you either have to code a portability layer so you can move to another one in the event of an unwanted change (which could be quite a lot of work), or you accept the risk that a 3rd party could cost you a lot of money until you can change off their service (which could be quite technically challenging depending on the complexity of your use case and the availability of comparable alternatives)
Whilst with things like container services you retain more control (ultimately you can self-host if need be) as soon as you step onto pure serverless you'll always be at the mercy of the providers of the services you use.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#40"This includes failed attempts which are blocked by their security rules." Ouch!
> Ouch!
Yeah, no kidding. It means someone nefarious (or bored) can easily run up a huge bill by just directing a ton of invalid requests to their API.
Many inexpensive hosting providers provide you with a lot of bandwidth (e.g. Scaleway offers unlimited bandwidth at ~200MBit/s). Assuming you can saturate the link, that's around 64TB per month of traffic. Quite the Firebase bill they'd have.