Should’ve used S3 for hosting files.
A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
201–210 of 516 posts
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#202I've only used Firebase for really small pet projects, and one of the big drivers making me hesitant to actually use it at work was the really large difficulty in actually transparently getting a grip on what my usage looked like.
A while ago their pricing model was based on concurrent connections to the live DB, but then you read the docs and it seemed to suggest that you had to do a different kind of math to actually figure out what your REAL usage was. Well, they decided that was way to complicated and so they nixed it. This scenario just reveals that this isn't really the issue -- the issue is trying to obfuscate what the real factors that the billing is based on. If they literally just gave you a dashboard with a breakdown of where the source of your bill would come out to, in detail, it would alleviate 100% of these issues. All we need/ed was better monitoring!
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ph…
So, you agree that Google's service is appalling, but claim that it is not appalling because the degree of appal has not changed over time? I cannot follow this logic.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#204> They said in most cases it doesn’t make a big difference… unless you use the REST API. So in the end it was a coding problem, because you forgot to add Keep-Alive = true? If you use the provided SDK's it should be no problem then right?
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.
With keep-alive you may not even need TLS session tickets (if the keep alive timeout is long enough).
keep-alive keeps the HTTP/TLS socket open.
TLS session tickets allow to close and "cheaply" reopen TLS session on a new socket for a new HTTP connection.
Using both keep-alive and TLS session tickets is optimal.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#205Earlier 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.
Of course it's not and I feel sorry for the author, but being smart doesn't mean that you know everything from dev to setting up servers. Most startups are just quickly glued up. What the author and team could do after they started growing is to start slowly moving to own infrastructure/backend. I'd advise any startup anyways to start with Saas and when money starts showing up then hire the remote guy to set up infrastucture.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#206Is there a large difference between using Firebase Database and another hosted DBaaS, such as MongoDB Atlas? I use Firebase Database but keep it arms length by avoiding any of the proprietary features it offers. I use it exclusively as a JSON store which I feel I can easily export at any time if I wanted to switch to another NoSQL DBaaS. A few people here are mentioning how it's crazy to depend on external services f…
Firebase is one of the very few products to offer controllable client data replication for full offline first functionality.
For apps that have significant offline requirements, this functionality can save a significant amount of time and significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and more importantly maintained.
One of my clients just recently seriously considered going with Firebase. The choice came down to Firebase and Couchbase, which has an even better offline functionality. After reading this post I am glad that we didn't going with Firebase.
Of course Couchbase has their own problems. The supported version of Couchbase is prohibitively expensive for small organizations and Couchbase themselves strongly recommended against deploying the community edition. (The community edition also artificially lags behind the supported edition 6 months. Couchbase even delays critical security fixes that same 6 months.)
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#207Reminds 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…
Oh I'm glad my Google App Engine service never became popular!
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#208We started using Firebase when it just launched, primarily because the top end plan said $200 for (almost) unlimited use. For what we were doing at that time this was a huge deal. Firebase have changed their pricing a couple of times since then. All said and done it's still a great service and we use Firebase in almost all our projects.
Maybe unrelated, but at the same time we started using Firebase, we started using (then) another startup called Intercom (www.intercom.io). Intercom was priced a flat $ 49 (or 50, do not remember exactly) then and it was a bargain for us. But since then Intercom has changed their pricing so many times that we ended up paying more for Intercom than for all our servers put together. Intercom is again a great service but we stopped using it because it wasn't worth the price.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#209Reminds 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…
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…
Google's ahead of you on that one. They don't accept debit cards. (At least the last time I tried with Google Cloud)
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.
I was about to post the same thing. Of the two Google cloud stories I saw on here yesterday, it felt like one in three posts had "disclaimer: I work on the Google cloud team" or something to that effect. As of this writing, there's 100 comments over 4 hours and not a peep from any of them that I see.
Sometimes I am wondering who is actually steering the discussion to a certain point. I wouldn't go so far to call it censorship, but if the Google employees take over the comment section, it is very hard to call the flow of information "unbiased".
YCombinator shouldn't let companies use Hacker News as a marketing tool, at least not to the extent Google does.