Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 516 posts

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

#291

Post by kalleboo »

_asummers wrote: post #136
corford wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the best way is setting up a completely isolated account with card. If you're extra paranoid, use a different bank for this account.

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.

My bank (in Sweden) lets me generate virtual debit card numbers with a specified cost cap and expiration date. It's some ancient-looking Flash widget though so I suspect it's a legacy feature...

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

#293

Post by dismantlethesun »

> 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.

Google Cloud support[1] comes with phone numbers to call at $400/month. It's a minimum requirement for anything that's mission critical. I understand that this poster was paying $25 a month typically, so it's not unreasonable that he didn't also shell for the $400/mo support package though it left him in the lurch when he had a time critical problem.

Realistically, I don't see why he didn't simply shut down the service the first day usage numbers spiked. Something that's only costing $25 a month to host, shouldn't have a huge opportunity cost when shut down.

Isn't Firebase part of Google Cloud?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

#294

Post by jhall1468 »

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.

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

Actually they are. Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains. Increasing prices helps your short term profit, but you tend to lose customers to competitors. Decreasing prices means less profit right now, but you tend to convert more customers.

Companies aren't purely RIGHT NOW profit-driven. That's why many companies burn cash and take on debt. They're driven by growth (whether vertical or horizontal). Bezos is obsessed with growth. That's why they've only recently started making money. Enormous investments in AWS, FBA and a host of other products put them in the red, but in doing so, Amazon has incredibly horizontal growth.

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

#295

Post by YCode »

roadbeats wrote: post #165

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 someth…

They don't seem to understand that once you lose trust and reputation in a community you will struggle to get it back.

For example this thread has more or less convinced me to take Firebase off the table for any future projects I might have used it for.

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

#296

Post by bluecmd »

neftaly wrote: post #221
brianwawok wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ><

https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

#297

Post by tscanausa »

somewhatoff wrote: post #129
Aeolun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jup, had the same issue with Google App Engine. Luckily I could contact support... "What do you mean, you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!" Fun times.

Yep. For me it was running instances that didn't respond to requests to delete or stop. They kept charging anyway. Support was somebody in a different timezone who complained when I didn't answer my phone in the middle of the night. I quite liked the Google Cloud offering, but to get so burnt so quickly... stay away.

Sorry to hear about this. I work for our cloud platform support team ( we don't cover firebsse) and this is not the impression we want our customers to get.

We don't want to be calling customers in the middle of their night while they are sleeping. Its not an effective way to resolve issues. We need help identifying when we fall short so we can fix the issues.

Ways to let us know: 1) fill out the survey when your case is closed. We review every survey but less then 1% of cases get the survey filled out. 2) tweet your case id at us and it also goes through our review process 3) email me (tsg@Google.com) and I can correct the problems. 4) GCP slack community has a whole bunch of active Googlers (and the community will flag one us down) if you are having problems with the support team.

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

#299

Post by sergior »

I understand the convenience of not having to manage such product, but more often than not is way more cost effective to rent some dedicated servers and run infrastructure for fraction of the cost. It is fairly easy to create resilient infrastructure nowadays and hw failures are very rare anyways. People are being fooled by fancy menus to overpay a mile for mediocre service.

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

#300

Post by mgkimsal »

mstade wrote: post #277
mgkimsal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases." That's the ONLY thing that will ever make this change, but it rarely happens because "sunk cost" rationalizations (and "maybe it'll get better next year!"). Shouting from the rooftops for years has not worked. This is not anywhere near a 'new' problem. Yes, possibly some people don't know it, and y…

Ok, I've missed your point now – what are you actually trying to say? That Google being unprofessional and delivering on the whole sub-par services is OK because a lot (but not all) people already know this, and so really paying customers should just suck it up or go elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they even can in the first place? If I've misrepresented what you're trying to say here please do correct me, be…

I think it's shitty. But it's also avoidable.

But to avoid it, you generally do research ahead of time. And/or be willing to actually walk away from your 'investment' on their platform and start again somewhere else.

In the OP case, they didn't sign up with google in the first place. It's doubly shitty for them, because they didn't ask for this, and could not have known in advance that google would end up being the support provider. Similar to when I refinanced a house, and 6 month later, my 'servicer' sold my loan to someone else with much crappier service (charge me $3/month to take an electronic payment from me? I wouldn't have chosen this as a service option).

Yes, paying customers should go elsewhere. Complaining about it to google directly and indirectly for a decade has not noticeable improved their support for their cloud offerings.

Suck it up or go elsewhere. You can keep registering complaints with them, or organize digital protests, or whatever, but to get better service, you will likely have to go somewhere else.

"I think customers should shout from the rooftops till they're blue if they want to, even if it seems to lead nowhere". Of course they can. They just need to realize it will not change the quality of support. Someone earlier (you?) said to 'vote with your wallet'. Shouting from the digital rooftops about how crappy service X is, but continuing to pay them, is a waste of time at best, and enabling at worst. Leaving for another service is voting with your wallet/budget, and it needs to happen.

Post reply on HN