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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

#181

Post by moduspol »

kbart wrote: post #151
moduspol wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it looks like the service provider hadn't taken into account an oddball use case in the pricing / metering, and then suddenly did. They certainly should have communicated that better and their tools / charts should have a way of showing the billable data, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it vendor lock-in. It's not like everyone on Firebase is complaining and the author admits they made major mistakes.

I'm not implying that this was made on purpose -- vendor lock-in might happen "naturally" as well, when company becomes big enough that they can start unilaterally change prices/conditions/services knowing that costumers will accept that (even grudgingly), because they have nowhere else to go or it is too expensive/complex. Google is the perfect example of this strategy. Smaller player or startup would probably go ba…

So far I've seen only one customer notably affected, and (judging by the post) I doubt they'll be sticking around on Firebase. There are a lot of take-aways for this story, but I don't think "vendor lock-in" really fits.

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

#182

Post by dqv »

taneq wrote: post #171
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.

Can you not ask the bank not to do this, though?

Yes, you can. The last few banks accounts I've created have all asked if I wanted overdraft protection. You say "NO! decline ANY transaction that would cause an overdraft"

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

#183

Post by MaulingMonkey »

princekolt wrote: post #128
moduspol wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it looks like the service provider hadn't taken into account an oddball use case in the pricing / metering, and then suddenly did. They certainly should have communicated that better and their tools / charts should have a way of showing the billable data, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it vendor lock-in. It's not like everyone on Firebase is complaining and the author admits they made major mistakes.

But why do providers get a free pass when they do a major mistake (à la GitLab losing tons of not-backed-up data), but customers are required to accept whatever the provider throws at them? It seems pretty unfair to me.

Providers to some degree get a free pass when they do their best to fix their mistakes.

In Gitlab's case, their response was excellent and their total data loss was less than a day's work - and even that only for a full time manipulator of gitlab metadata (project managers? some parts of QA?): "Database data such as projects, issues, snippets, etc. created between January 31st 17:20 UTC and 23:30 UTC has been lost. Git repositories and Wikis were not removed as they are stored separately." ( https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o... )

Considering that "[...] out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place." ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GCK53YDcBWQveod9kfzW-VCx... ), this was a pretty amazing result, and about the best a response they could make. That, combined with their transparency, earns something of a pass (especially when data loss I care about is already limited by git's DVCS nature, even if they had obliterated the repository data.)

In Firelab's case, if no other action is taken, they've actively mislead their customer in failing to follow through on crediting their account, charged them an obscene and unsupported price hike, and gone incommunicado. That's like... an anti-pass.

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

#184

Post by alwan »

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 support team is a python scripts. You cannot call someone and get real help.

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

#185

Post by delhanty »

jbob2000 wrote: post #172
delhanty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There could be technical issues with keeping grandfathered plans around. Maybe the 16mb email accounts were on an old system that was getting increasingly difficult to maintain?

I'm sure that's true.

But then it's not my problem.

FastMail made an agreement - $15 in exchange for a lifetime member account.

Now they don't want to honour that agreement.

And they've created work for me: What to do about my father's email account?

I have his email address as part of the domain that I have associated with my (legacy) FastMail enhanced account. They've discontinued family accounts for new signups.

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

#186

Post by corford »

mseebach wrote: post #174
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…

Of course, this approach only works if you're happy to have your service cut off more or less abruptly if your card bounces, something the author of the article explicitly mentions isn't an option. The problem (in the article at least) isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.

They won't cut you off immediately and the gain you get is some breathing space/wriggle room to decide what your next step is going to be once you've been landed with a huge, unexpected bill.

Also, nothing gets them talking to you faster than a bounced invoice :)

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by moduspol »

DomBlack wrote: post #11

> Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path! Isn't using AWS Lamba as your gateway, trapping you into using a specific service, just as much as firebase was?

You wouldn't have clients talk to AWS Lambda directly. You'd put it behind API Gateway, which would allow you to use your own domain in front. Your clients would just know to send requests to https://myapi.mycorp.com.

Since you control the domain, you could then stop something like this more quickly.

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

#189

Post by motoboi »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #61

$1/GB AYFKM? That's ridiculous. Should be about $0.01/GB.

It looks like a good pricing model.

To me it seems they correlate bandwidth usage with system usage and charge you using bandwidth as a surrogate of computing time, hardware and lahour (plus the bandwidth).

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

#190

Post by yeukhon »

victorhooi wrote: post #155
Yizahi wrote: post #31

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" :) .

What you said is quite untrue. I know - because I am one of those humans in support grins . I work in the support organisation for GSuite (formerly Google Apps). And I work across the hall from the guys who support GCP (Google Cloud Platform). And there are an entire army of us, helping support many, many enterprise customers. Even our consumer products have real people manning support phones - I know, because I've h…

Apparently time after time stories arise with Googlr lack of support and are very slow at answering ans helping. In this very damn case no freakin' response. Often people have to get a Googler to initiate a Hello wothin the organization. So while we respect you doing your day work, we think your organization as a whole fail at customer support. Yeah I have read sicceyss stories too but many of them seen to be businesses with really good pocket or have deep connection with Google already or just being lucky.

Your competitor AWS would refund in less than an hour with a billing support, without going through any phone calls. Your competitor has a support subscription service at least for people to purchase (expensive but worth it). Yours?

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