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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

#91

Post by samastur »

mgkimsal wrote: post #84
mstade wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.

> It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences , but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'c…

Just as a restaurant can be appalling from when it was first opened and even if you don't visit it ever, other services can. Appalling doesn't depend on personal experience or lack of prior knowledge.

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

#92

Post by mstade »

dkersten wrote: post #82
distances wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either. It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscripti…

This. I too dreaded the switch because of all the history, but the migration to fastmail was quick and painless, and I lost nothing. (Arguably, losing everything would've been better, so much useless noise in my history.)

Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.

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

#93

Post by yunolisten »

Mithaldu wrote: post #80
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.

Agreed in part, however TLS Tokens and Keep alive aren't specific to this vendor... it's something that the author should be doing anyway. If they were to self host rather than contract out the underlying service upon which they depend they may have figured this out sooner.

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

#94

Post by elorant »

mgkimsal wrote: post #84
mstade wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.

> It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences , but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'c…

It's appalling because you're a paying customer. I can understand free services not having support, but any service that's costing money should at the very least have a human being responding through email.

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

#95

Post by yunolisten »

awjr wrote: post #86
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.

Be very careful here. The developer may not have used TLS BUT any failed authorisation attempts are also counted in the bandwidth. So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials.

> So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials.

You could argue that for pretty much anything being hosted, anywhere.

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

#97

Post by fovc »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #48
philfrasty wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

„...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...

..making up in scale what you lose in margin. I think Amazon pulls this off because their prima donna is the paying customer, not the programmer who thinks talking directly to customers is the worst possible reflection of their ability to automate. Automation is great and all, but Google has a major problem when it comes to empathizing with the customers. Also, is there any possibility of legal action against Google…

I would seriously look into small claims court. It's allegedly somewhat effective with airlines (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/small-claims...)

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

#98

Post by steego »

jakozaur wrote: post #4

Yet 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 think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses.

First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers).

When you look at it through this lens, you can see how Google as an institution can tolerate experimenting with ideas that are disconnected from revenue models and dropping failed ideas like hot potatoes. It makes sense for them to behave that way.

Amazon's services are almost always designed with either a concrete or direct path to revenue upfront and they have a huge customer support infrastructure they can tap into. They move a little slower in certain areas of R&D because customer obsessed businesses are tolerant of deprecating technology when it doesn't work out. That means they'll do more market research, take less risks and focus on tenaciously steady growth rather than trying to always hit it out of the park.

When choosing a vendor, it's important to understand how their offerings affect the solvency of their business and whether it fits into their core competency.

In this case, Firebase's prices were too low. That should have been a warning sign. The other warning sign is Firebase is a such a small percentage of Google's revenue, Google doesn't have a huge incentive to fix customer service issues.

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

#99

Post by doczoidberg »

factsaresacred wrote: post #16

I use Firebase and find it easy, useful and constantly improving (cloud functions etc.). Their support, however, is a joke. 5 questions can be logged per year for one-on-one email support and then you're on your own. And this is for urgent requests. I can understand not wanting to be inundated with wasteful questions but when Firebase is changing their API and pricing plans and you're trying to scale a product, and p…

they respond quite fast on the google group. I had never problems with firebase support

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

#100

Post by IanDrake »

I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for renting equipment vs the cloud.

I've never understood the advantages of these services except for when you have drastic usage changes throughout the day.

But all the younger folks seem to think it's awesome:

"Look ma, I didn't even need to register my own domain, wait for DNS propagation, or install software, or wait a few days for hardware to be provisioned. That cut my MVP time from 30 days to 25 days!"

For about $250/m I can get a dedicated windows server that can handle just about anything a startup can throw at it. Sure it's work, but not too much work.

Hardware matters. I would estimate the cost of running in the cloud to be 3-4x more expensive than rented hardware. The $60/m VPS you're getting with a virtual core is usually one hyperthread on one actual core. That's a lot of money for so little and hourly billing doesn't help if you're using it 24/7.

The proprietary SAAS situation is even worse than VPSs. Besides the lock in, the billing is so abstracted from reality that you'll never realize how much you're overpaying.

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