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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

#71

Post by cwmma »

They said the issue was due to TLS tickets and not setting keep alive values. TLS tickets are await of resuming a TLS session without having to renegotiate it, considering that you are only polling for a boolean, that negotiation overhead could be much greater then the actual being passed. This isn't something specific to firebase so that's why no library would mention it.

Keep alive is a flag that allows you to reuse a single connection instead of closing it, if it's closed then again you have to renegotiate things. So it sound like you may have been inadvertently spamming them with tls connection requests, the fact that they said they were counting blocked requests makes it passable that you were also sending invalid tls handshakes.

This would make the real issue that they had been previously underreporting your usage and now are correctly counting it. Now if they had wanted to keep your business they should have, you know, warned your first or helped you fix your code instead of just surprising you like that. The fact that the change was going to cause a customers bill to spike should have been a red flag to them.

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

#72

Post by yunolisten »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #68

So, they discovered they were under billing by measuring bandwidth via the server logs instead of at the switch. Then proceeded to not tell a soul they would be making a change that has the potential to greatly increase your bill. Do I have that right?

Pretty much :)

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

#73

Post by Ygg2 »

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…

Google new motto - Speak to the Wall™

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

#74

Post by hackjam600 »

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

#75

Post by distances »

dkersten wrote: post #69
bbcbasic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail still rocks

I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!

FastMail is so much better than GMail. I don't know why I didn't change earlier.

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

#76

Post by yunolisten »

Shame on them for not giving notice and a proper explanation of the change. They were vastly under reporting the cost of providing the service. Consider that they are a business.

Shame on you for not using resumable TLS sessions/Keep alive. You're hammering their infrastructure. The change in how they meter usage is seeing you having to compensate them for the resource they provide you.

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

#77

Post by oblio »

Ygg2 wrote: post #73
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…

Google new motto - Speak to the Wall™

Well, it sort of makes sense, Google is literally "speak to the wall". Isn't that what we do all day long while googling? We're no longer asking humans and asking questions to a "talking wall".

For a funnier variant, https://lmgtfy.com/

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

#78

Post by grw_ »

Aeolun wrote: post #28
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.

AFAIK this doesn't happen by default, since by default the autoscaling will reduce instance count to 0 if the old versions aren't receiving any traffic.

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

#79

Post by josephg »

jondubois wrote: post #35

Synchronizing 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…

> Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive

No, its not. I was responsible for implementing, deploying and managing the infrastructure at lever.co when we were a tiny fledgeling startup. The entire application is built on top of JSON OT. I took some measurements at one point when we had ~thousands of active browser sessions of our app. At the time we were seeing about 1-2 OT merges (transform + re-apply) per day. All the other non-concurrent operations can get sent straight to the database. I don't know what the numbers are now, but I'd be shocked if OT ever becomes the bottleneck.

For text based OT you'll see more concurrent edits. But for text based OT, I have a little C library that can comfortably do 20 million simple text OT transforms/second on a single core of my old 2012 macbook air. Good luck making that a bottleneck.

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

#80

Post by Mithaldu »

yunolisten wrote: post #76

Shame on them for not giving notice and a proper explanation of the change. They were vastly under reporting the cost of providing the service. Consider that they are a business. Shame on you for not using resumable TLS sessions/Keep alive. You're hammering their infrastructure. The change in how they meter usage is seeing you having to compensate them for the resource they provide you.

Absolutely no shame on the author for something that can be easily overlooked, wasn't documented and not reported by any tool.
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