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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

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

"Don't be evil." was dropped in 2015 or thereabouts IIRC. I'd guess when they realised it was becoming more of a joke than a motto: "Google, the company who's motto is 'don't be evil' angered customers again today when ...

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

#142

Post by mstade »

corford wrote: post #126
mstade wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, let the providers take the risk. Typically, the providers will let it bounce a few times before cutting things off as well. This might just give you another week or two to sort things out, without having to lay out possibly significant funds that you may or may not be able to reclaim. I only wish setting up virtual cards were as easy as setting up a new mail box. I know there are services out there that lets…

To be honest, the best way is setting up a completely isolated account with card. If you're extra paranoid, use a different bank for this account.

Well, that's pretty much what a virtual card is – you transfer funds to it like you would with any other bank account, and it's not in your bank. It'll be a debit card with no overdraft, so any charges over what is in the account will be denied. This won't fly with places that require a credit card, like car rental agencies for instance, but that's a non issue in this case obviously.

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

#143

Post by bendavis381 »

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.

Have you used them recently? Their support has been extremely good in my experience, and I'm far from a premium customer. Email/phone support readily available. Loads of their engineers available over slack.

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

#144

Post by mstade »

_asummers wrote: post #136
corford wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the best way is setting up a completely isolated account with card. If you're extra paranoid, use a different bank for this account.

To be honest, this all sounds like it should be a primary bank feature. I should be able to cap a recurring payment at $X for a specific vendor otherwise have it go through automatically.

That South African hackable (in the good sense of the word) bank that's been making the rounds on HN might be able to do this. (I forget the name of the bank.)

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

#145

Post by kelvin0 »

Yeah this 'bug' has also bit us once, when we first started using LogMeIn. At first the fees were reasonable and we decided to go with them to do customer support on their PCs running our software.

Every year since then, the cost has gone up significantly (ransomware?) and we always bit the bullet, until we finally dropped them.

Beware: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450297646/LogMeIn-custome...

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

#146

Post by ikeboy »

mstade wrote: post #118
corford wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Solution: get a separate debit (not credit!) card for all cloud stuff. Make sure you only transfer enough money on to it each month to cover what you reasonably expect your bills to be (and that you can quickly top it up in hours if you legitimately need to). Worst case, if AWS or Google decide to fuck you over, let the bill bounce. This way you've still got funds on hand to deal wi…

I agree, let the providers take the risk. Typically, the providers will let it bounce a few times before cutting things off as well. This might just give you another week or two to sort things out, without having to lay out possibly significant funds that you may or may not be able to reclaim. I only wish setting up virtual cards were as easy as setting up a new mail box. I know there are services out there that lets…

emburse.com

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

#147

Post by corford »

_asummers wrote: post #136
corford wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the best way is setting up a completely isolated account with card. If you're extra paranoid, use a different bank for this account.

To be honest, this all sounds like it should be a primary bank feature. I should be able to cap a recurring payment at $X for a specific vendor otherwise have it go through automatically.

My personal bank sort of gives me that with their fraud protection. If a one off huge charge appears from a company that regularly bills me (but at much smaller amounts), their fraud system sends a text asking if I want to authorise or block the charge.

The second bank account is really more for protecting you against black swan events. If all your accounts are under the same bank and have the same owner, there's nothing stopping the bank taking funds from one of your accounts to make up for shortfalls in another.

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

#148

Post by mining »

alexfi wrote: post #33
Buge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's absolutely good manners for Firebase to tell you "If you fix this thing, your costs will go down."

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

#149

Post by logicallee »

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…

is there a typo here? 18ms seems like soemthing that could be designed into their whole infrastructure for some reason you don't know about (such as partitioning of networks, whatever) -- after all, it's a cloud solution, right? Maybe 18 ms tacked onto every request is fine for them.

To be honest, if all of my Internet requests were 18 ms slower I wouldn't even notice.

if I read you correctly and it wasn't a typo, could you mention why you cared so much? The .1 ms you quoted on localhost is extraordinarily quick and I wouldn't expect it to translate to a cloud...

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

#150

Post by mgkimsal »

elorant wrote: post #94
mgkimsal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But you KNOW going in - there's no support.

You know this by

a) hundreds and thousands of horror stories from people saying "I did not get any support from google". You can counter that with "here are people who did get support", but the existence of the thousands of support nightmare stories out there gives you enough evidence to know that this isn't really "supported" in the way you might expect.

b) there are no phone numbers. https://firebase.google.com/support/ - no phone numbers. That's, of course, not the sole criteria you should use to judge potential support, but... it's google.

It's 2017. We have multiple years of knowing what Google's track record is re: support for paying customers. Outside of large adwords advertisers (where they make a lot of money), it's non-existent from a practical standpoint.

The big problem here is that firebase was fine until google acquired them.

I'm reminded of a time when I had a bad experience at a restaurant. Local place I went to with friends from work. We went... probably 4-5 times per year, and I loved the chicken sandwich they did. Last time I went, it was ... bad. Not what I'd expected at all. It was different.

Server asks "how's everything?". I said I was disappointed that the chicken sandwich had changed - it was not as good as before. Now... I wasn't actually complaining as in "comp the meal", but I was not a satisfied diner.

"Nothing's changed sir".

"um... yeah - this is nowhere near as good as it used to be".

"You're wrong, nothing's changed".

We had a back and forth, and they went back and came out "the cooks say the recipe is exactly the same".

This was getting a bit ridiculous. Manager came over, same exchange. He leaves, the comes back and says "they're right - the recipe is 100% the same. We have changed a few ingredients last month, but it's the same".

Maybe that doesn't actually relate to the google service situation at all now, come to think of it, but I was reminded of that situation when I started typing it :)

Oh yeah - nothing changed from OP's end, except how the new owner (google) decided to start monitoring and accounting for usage. Think of a "$9.99 all you can eat buffet" getting loyal diners, then changing owners, and the new owners giving some people a $95 bill at the end of the meal because they'd decided to also charge for any visits to the salad bar over 2. Most diners would never hit that limit, but a few - loyal diners for years - would have been (rightly) upset at the after-the-fact change.

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