A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Moru » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #105

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…

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…

In Sweden we have at least one bank that has e-cards where you can set up a new card for each transaction. You decide how long it is valid in months and for how much total and recieve a unique card number and ccv. I have been using this at least 15 years for payments online. You set it up, make the payment and then immediately close the card again if you want to be extra safe.

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

#302

Post by MichaelGG » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

dqv wrote: post #182

taneq wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

But they seem to be able to delay debits for several days, perhaps a week? At least on WellsFargo. Isn't this a backdoor/loophole to get around the no overdraft issue?

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

#303

Post by jhall1468 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

forgottenacc57 wrote: post #270

Google Compute Engine is Bing. One day they'll just realize they've lost, partly due to their shit attitude to customer support, and close their public cloud. FFS if you run a public cloud you've just damn well GOT to understand you can never cut off the customer service for any reason, especially "because your site got too busy". What a bunch of PhDs. The reason Google is so deeply unwilling to engage its customers…

> The reason Google is so deeply unwilling to engage its customers to provide support is in the DNA of the company - they are all PhDs, and how many PhDs have the slightest idea of how to help and talk to a customer.

No they aren't lol. The majority of Google employees have B.S. degrees. The reason Amazon is so good at this stuff is because, at their core, they do everything they can to make the customer happy. Google doesn't really understand that. Not because they are PhD's (like, what the hell does that matter), but because customer service was never a thing they needed to do.

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

#304

Post by scardine » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

moneytalks wrote: post #273

scardine wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if Firebase has a reseller program, but for other cloud offers from Google, my advice is: if you want someone you can scream at, buy from a reseller instead of buying directly from Google. Last week at thegoodfellas.com.br a disgruntled ex-employee managed to erase all their Gmail accounts and change the administrator account in order to prevent recovery. You can recover a deleted account in 5 days, but…

I administer a couple G Suite accounts for small business owner friends purchased direct from Google. G Suite has incredible phone support. I've called 3-4 times over past 5 years and never waited more than 30 seconds to talk to a knowledgeable and capable tech who resolved the issue immediately. No BS troubleshooting steps, just straight to the heart of the issue. I recall a couple Irish guys, one Eastern European a…

G Suite support from Google improved a lot, but for good reasons it is not easy to recover access to an administrator account that was modified to prevent recovery. In a case like this, how support personel can tell a legitimate customer from someone trying to gain access through social engineering?

A local reseller can pay you a visit and verify the situation but hands are tied for the friendly Kumar sitting at a helpdesk facility in India.

Here in Brazil it is even harder, because most customers are unable to communicate well in English and support in Portuguese is not done by native speakers.

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

#305

Post by tlarkworthy » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

betageek wrote: post #15

The detail that amazed me is the lack of visibility of the issue in reporting tools - it's all very well changing the terms, but not giving your customer any ability to see what is increasing the bill seems massively unfair.

The database usage tab in the web console tells you how much bandwidth you have consumed including SSL.

Author's issue was with the commandline profiler.

(A Firebase dev)

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

#306

Post by jhall1468 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #193

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 would assume you get the support if you pay for it. Google, Azure and AWS seem to have all gone the same way. You select the service level and pay monthly fee. I don't know if this support covers Firebase. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/ https://cloud.google.com/support/

Yes and no. If an AWS customer ran up a bill like this, Amazon would absolutely cover them. They've done it hundreds of times. There's a very different culture between Google and Amazon when it comes to customer service.

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

#307

Post by traviswingo » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #105

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…

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…

Yeah. This is where something like Final[1] would be super helpful.

1. https://getfinal.com

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

#308

Post by sergior » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #288

jayd16 wrote: post #256

The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure. Not to mention they would have been paying the full costs of their bandwidth from the start. The real lesson to learn here is to never hit a paid service going through a…

> The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure. "We went from a Skype group of 10 beta testers to hundreds of active users, then thousands in only a few short months." Getting off the ground required supporting thous…

And that machine could serve all the traffic they need and also pay full time dev op guy if needed still for fraction of the cost of the cloud

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

#309

Post by corford » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

rhodysurf wrote: post #283

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…

For Google Cloud can't you set a billing limit for it to not exceed? That's what I have done but I have not come close to exceeeding it yet so IDK if there is something I am missing.

Should be fine I think providing there are no circumstances where Google can decide to ignore the limit (don't have much experience with their cloud stuff).

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

#310

Post by davidlee1435 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

Relatively new developer here- does anybody have any advice for someone who eventually wants to migrate a web app from Firebase to a custom server if I start to see good traction on the project? I was initially drawn to Firebase because I could iterate quickly, but now I'm not so sure if I should continue with them.