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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

#231

Post by Can_Not »

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?

Yeah but you could move their account over physically but continue to not bill them. I doubt 16MB is anything more than a properly enforced column value in a CRM.

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

#232

Post by r1ch »

I feel like a dinosaur running all of our services on dedicated server infrastructure (OVH) but every time I see stories like this I'm glad I do. Unlimited bandwidth, a fixed monthly fee, absolutely zero surprises. I think far too many startups jump immediately into the cloud, where costs and volatility are magnitudes higher than your own infrastructure.

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

#233

Post by degenerate »

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…

> we introduced a bug

I know it's not the case, but this wording makes it sound intentional. May as well say "We designed an internal problem"

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

#234

Post by bradynapier »

moduspol wrote: post #188
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.

yes, this is exactly how it is implemented now

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

#235

Post by autotypo »

_e wrote: post #89
bbcbasic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail still rocks

I pay for G Suite and basically the only thing anyone uses is Gmail. I don't have hard proof but I feel that all of my emails from my domain never go to spam. I one time had to use Godaddy's email system and ALL emails went to people's spam folder. It is like Google makes you pay for email or your emails won't get delivered properly. Maybe it was Godaddy's mail system's IP that was blacklisted but I think you have to…

Did the sender domains in question have SPF records at any point?

SPF is essentially a self-maintained whitelist.

Blacklists are public and searchable. Something to check after dealing with an infected machine, for example.

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

#236

Post by unoti »

josephg wrote: post #79
jondubois wrote: post #35

Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive (this applies to both Operational Transform and Differential Synchronization approaches). The price of Firebase was probably kept artificially low to attract new users but this was a ticking timebomb. Those people/companies who are using Firebase as their primary database are going to suffer now. It should really only be used for specific applications where…

> Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive No, its not. I was responsible for implementing, deploying and managing the infrastructure at lever.co when we were a tiny fledgeling startup. The entire application is built on top of JSON OT. I took some measurements at one point when we had ~thousands of active browser sessions of our app. At the time we were seeing about 1-2 OT merges (transform + re-…

Wow, this comment and learning about JSON OT was super helpful to me. Thank you for letting me know about it!

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

#237

Post by danellis »

specialp wrote: post #214
taneq wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Now in the USA as of 2012, banks cannot turn on overdraft protection on a debit card unless the customer requests. Prior to this they were taking your day's debits and applying the largest one first. So suppose you bought lunch for $10 and a coffee for $3 then your cable company later in the day billed you for an amount in excess of your account. They would then apply the cable company bill first, then the 2 smaller…

The order wouldn't matter in that case, would it? Either way it's still deducting the sum of those three transactions at the end of the day.

I thought what they were doing is applying all your debits, charging you if that puts you into overdraft, and then applying any credits. If they applied the credits first, you wouldn't go below zero.

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

#239

Post by demonshreder »

kartickv wrote: post #212
_asummers wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This works well in India, with 2-factor auth — Indian companies can't charge my debit or credit card just because they have the card number, expiry and CVV. I have to approve each transaction with my bank. I'm wary of giving my card information to companies outside India because I don't have this protection.

>Indian companies can't charge my debit or credit card just because they have the card number, expiry and CVV. I have to approve each transaction with my bank.

True for Indian companies but what if you get charged via Forex abroad? For me - Google or Steam - don't required 2FA. All I have to do is to enter my number, confirm CVV then zap. It gets debited. I do get a call from my bank (HDFC) asking if this transaction has been initiated by me, if I say yes, they let go.

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

#240

Post by xirdstl »

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)

Maybe you can use a credit card that allows you to generate virtual card numbers with dollar limits. I use one all the time.
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