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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

#161

Post by ninju »

logicallee wrote: post #157
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ...

Can you link to a report or some source, stating they dropped the "don't be evil"? where do you get that, and the date, please? Thanks.

http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/alphabet-google-evil/

... The new code of conduct has a close approximation of the philosophy—though perhaps more formally phrased—in the very first sentence of the preface: "Employees of Alphabet... should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect."

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

#162

Post by bradynapier »

camus2 wrote: post #70
bolololo1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still cheaper for a single dev starting a startup to hook up to Firebase/AWS/Azure than hiring 'cheap' devs from Poland.

> Still cheaper for a single dev starting a startup to hook up to Firebase/AWS/Azure than hiring 'cheap' devs from Poland. Yes but you gotta be smart here. It's not like Firebase is the only database out there. And once your product grows, and you hit Firebase limits which forces you in the "pay as you go" plan, whatever cheapness you thought you bought into quickly becomes a huge expanse.

Precisely where we find ourselves and the inspiration for the article.

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

#163

Post by daemin »

corford wrote: post #123
daemin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the bank can just automatically give you an overdraft for that amount, add some fees because you accessed that facility, and require you to pay the full amount. After all, they're just being helpful in managing your money and paying your suppliers.

Not sure who you bank with but our bank will bounce it if honouring it would require going overdrawn beyond €500.

There are limits to overdraw facilities, sure. But they are also included by default in many accounts.

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

#164

Post by delhanty »

shaqbert wrote: post #7

Pricing 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…

Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment.

16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is associated with my FastMail enhanced account.

I don't want my $15 back. What I DO want is for FastMail to honour our existing agreement, which was a LIFE-TIME 16 Mb member account in exchange for $15.

See also here:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?p=599512

Text of their latest email is below the line:

=============================================

Back in January we contacted you with some important information about your @.* FastMail account.

We're now contacting you again to remind you that from 31st July, 2017 our 'Member' level plans will be discontinued.

To continue using your FastMail account after this time you'll need to select one of our current plans. Please note: your email address will remain the same.

As a long-time FastMail user we're offering you 50% OFF all upgrades until the end of July, which includes our already discounted multi-year subscriptions.

And if you upgrade now we'll also add all the remaining time until 31 July for free!

As an added bonus we've also given you $15 credit to put towards your subscription, which is equal to the amount you originally paid for your account.

This means if you were to upgrade to a Basic account today for one year, with the discount and account credit you are effectively getting FastMail at no charge until 31 July 2018 with a massive 2 GB of storage (up from 16 MB)!

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

#165

Post by roadbeats »

I have a game being mostly used by kids and it doesn't generate revenue, and it has been in the free tier of Firebase for about 2 years. This month suddenly my account got disabled due to DB usage (I only keep sessions and ids, still can't believe I exceeded DB usage). But the traffic was same as old. About 1.5 weeks ago I woke up at 6am with an e-mail telling me my account was disabled. And I had to switch to something else, spending hours. I don't recommend using Firebase to anyone anymore.

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

#166

Post by vthallam »

manigandham wrote: post #34
shaqbert wrote: post #7

Pricing 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.

> What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit

Of course, they are a business. But they look at minimising the price, increase the scale, have a monopoly and earn money.

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

#167

Post by jamesk_au »

Possibly relevant (from the Firebase FAQ[1]):

Why was my Realtime Database reported bandwidth lower than average between September 2016 and March 2017?

For our bandwidth calculations, we normally include SSL encryption overhead (based on layer 5 of the OSI model). However, in September 2016, we introduced a bug that caused our bandwidth reporting to ignore encryption overhead. This might have resulted in artificially low reported bandwidth and bills on your account for a few months.

We released a fix for the bug in late March 2017, returning bandwidth reporting and billing to their normal levels.

Does not excuse the issue with support.

[1] https://firebase.google.com/support/faq/

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

#168

Post by elvirs »

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…

privacy.com?

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

#169

Post by tamalsaha001 »

cwmma wrote: post #71

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 reus…

Interestingly I was researching TLS forward secrecy. And the recommendation seems to be to disable tls tickets. https://timtaubert.de/blog/2014/11/the-sad-state-of-server-s...

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

#170

Post by grenoire »

ninju wrote: post #161
logicallee wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to a report or some source, stating they dropped the "don't be evil"? where do you get that, and the date, please? Thanks.

http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/alphabet-google-evil/ ... The new code of conduct has a close approximation of the philosophy—though perhaps more formally phrased—in the very first sentence of the preface: "Employees of Alphabet... should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect."

"treat each other with respect"

Sounds like a loophole, not just 'more formally.'

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