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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

#313
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…

For a API service with a few thousand occasional users, you can probably get away with a $5/Month VM at Linode.

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

#314

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.

You could take a look at Parse - it is a backend as a service that Facebook open sourced that still gets active development http://parseplatform.org/

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

#316
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…

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't cut you off immediately and the gain you get is some breathing space/wriggle room to decide what your next step is going to be once you've been landed with a huge, unexpected bill. Also, nothing gets them talking to you faster than a bounced invoice :)

Perhaps. Or perhaps they block or throttle your account. Stopping payment is the nuclear option, you can't expect any cooperation with outstanding payments on your account (not that you necessarily can with a fully paid up account), and your position, if you should choose to pursue legal action, just got a lot more complicated.

To be clear, the only time any of this matters is when a huge, unexpected bill arrives. Day to day, you should anticipate any big, legitimate bills and make sure funds are there to settle them (or you scale back usage to avoid getting smacked).

It's when a big bill lands in error or is introduced sneakily that having a separate "cloud only card" can save you. In that case, it's the supplier that's gone nuclear and you're just responding in kind.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail still rocks

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

Well, to be perfectly honest, you are paying for Fastmail, while Gmail is free.

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

#319
In general, you shouldn't use services which you don't understand completely, can debug, and have source code for if there're other options. I think that's why open source took over the world. It might seem to be more expensive, but in the end, it's a better option. Even if the service you use have a great support and fixes bugs instantaneously, it's better to have more control.
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