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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

#221

Post by neftaly »

brianwawok wrote: post #119
neftaly wrote: post #45

We've also gone from ~$25/mo to $1000-2000/mo with the pricing change. While it's not the end of the world (we're near shipping replacements for FB stuff anyway), there's also been 3-4 incidents of downtime (> 1 hour) in the last 2 months, with no way to contact anyone except their stupid web form.

Do you not pay for support? It starts at $150..

No - how do you opt in? Can't find it on any of the billing or pricing pages, and can only find the message "we do not currently offer Enterprise contracts, pricing, or support".

That said, we'd only need support to get ETAs on outages being resolved ><

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

#222

Post by brazzledazzle »

curiousgal wrote: post #209
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…

Google's ahead of you on that one. They don't accept debit cards. (At least the last time I tried with Google Cloud)

Does your debit card have a credit card number?

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

#223

Post by izacus »

mining wrote: post #148
alexfi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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

I wonder how many HN startup founders go around telling their customers on how to pay less.

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

#224

Post by ioquatix »

bitexploder wrote: post #102
dkersten wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest way of dealing with Google is to just cancel your credit card... You won't get your money back (unless a CC dispute gets it back). Google are impossible to get any customer service from, which is why I refuse to use any of their non-free offerings (and have limited my use of their free stuff to hangouts and google docs).

Take them to small claims court, if you have a legitimate grievance. In most jurisdictions a lawyer cannot represent a defendant. At best it will get them moving. It will be sure to at least make them take notice, even if you you have at least costed them and made them account for your grievance. edit: Meant, even if you lose you have cost them significantly an that has the intended effect of signaling they should im…

That sounds like a good way to ensure your access to every Google service gets permanently revoked.

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

#225

Post by pier25 »

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…

For technical questions Puf seems to be telepathically connected to StackOverflow. He has answered any of my questions within a an hour or two at the most.

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

#226

Post by devrand »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141
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 ...

I continuously see this mentioned, but it's simply not true. The Google code of conduct is still prefaced with that phrase: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Alphabet created a new code of conduct when it was formed that didn't use the phrase, but it was never dropped from Google.

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

stemuk wrote: post #59
kuschku wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably the purpose of this post — the best way to get support from Google, after all, is still by posting a story on reddit, twitter or HN. Which is pretty sad.

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.

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by Aissen »

jamesk_au wrote: post #167

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…

I'm guessing they had to update this FAQ after they started ignoring the OP (and other customers) messages. Also, something is wrong with the timeline with regards to the OP's blogpost where they say they've been using Firebase for a while.

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

#229

Post by srinathrajaram »

dkersten wrote: post #69
bbcbasic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail still rocks

I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!

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

No angels anywhere.

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

#230

Post by danellis »

curiousgal wrote: post #209
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…

Google's ahead of you on that one. They don't accept debit cards. (At least the last time I tried with Google Cloud)

That isn't true. I use a debit card for GCP.
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