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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

#351

Post by korzun »

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…

> In this position my first step would be to determine if there's any legal basis for disputing the charge

Let's calm down.

The first step is to pay the bill, set up better infrastructure monitoring on your end, so you don't act surprised that you are consuming 7000% more resources than third party service is reporting.

Then, if you want to burn some money, you can file a petition and tell the court that you deserve to get free service because you did not know that you have been going over the reported data by 50%, I mean 7000% for... two years.

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

#353

Post by sync »

Moru wrote: post #301
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…

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.

Final is doing a take on this as well for the US: https://getfinal.com/

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

#354

Post by korzun »

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…

The original post claims they had the service for over two years and everything was smooth.

Something does not add up here.

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

#355

Post by baloneyman »

randomf1fan wrote: post #289
Andrenid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting to that point for me too now. I'm really really close to removing them from every aspect of my life. Professional and private.

I did that. It took me two years to move everything over (email took the longest time), but it's been totally worth it. I still have my @gmail address, but it's only there to forward email to my real address, and I never log in or send email. Besides junk mail and spam, I am now at a point where I get maybe 1-2 real emails on my @gmail account, and then I tell the sender to use my new address. My google usage is now…

Uhhhh using Chrome?

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

#356

Post by noja »

YCode wrote: post #295
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.

Yet they keep doing it, so are their numbers showing otherwise?

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

#357

Post by lucb1e »

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…

Won't they legally force you into paying (assuming everything they did was legal)?

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

#358

Post by sergior »

tschellenbach wrote: post #321
sergior wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems hard at $25 a month :)

You can get devops for $1 a month from Asia and dedicated server from an auction. You could still have some $$$ for a coffee!

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

#359

Post by GavinMcG »

Moru wrote: post #301
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…

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.

Citibank does this as well, at least with my credit card.
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