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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

#391

Post by danholevoet »

factsaresacred wrote: post #16

I use Firebase and find it easy, useful and constantly improving (cloud functions etc.). Their support, however, is a joke. 5 questions can be logged per year for one-on-one email support and then you're on your own. And this is for urgent requests. I can understand not wanting to be inundated with wasteful questions but when Firebase is changing their API and pricing plans and you're trying to scale a product, and p…

Dan from Firebase here. I’d like to clarify a few details about the support options that are available. First, the limit of five questions per year applies only to technical troubleshooting questions (i.e. some indeterminate issue in your code that you’d like help with). Developers are always able to contact us an unlimited number of times for issues relating to identified bugs or to request features. Additionally, any questions relating to your account or bills (such as the issue in the original post) are also unlimited.

With that said, it’s been a year since we introduced the five-a-year limit on technical troubleshooting questions. I’ll see if this is actually a useful limit to keep in place and remove it if not.

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

#392

Post by RangerScience »

sync wrote: post #353
Moru wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I like the look of Final, but $50/year seem pretty pricey for a credit card. Why's it worth it?

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

#393

Post by randomf1fan »

baloneyman wrote: post #355
randomf1fan wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, Firefox.

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

#394

Post by stemuk »

mayop100 wrote: post #366

[Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue. There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help ot…

It is hard to believe that tools to prevent overage use in the $25 plan haven't been developed earlier. All the necessary components were there: It has always been possible to track the use of resources per user, and it has at least in the early version of Firebase been able to send out warning emails if the enforced limits are approaching. So, to me it seems like a no-brainer to combine these two, in particular for a large company like Google.

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

#395

Post by demonshreder »

kartickv wrote: post #272
demonshreder wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yes, foreign transactions are exempt, which is why I said I was wary giving my card to companies outside India.

My bad.

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

#396

Post by zapt02 »

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.

Unfortunately my bank (Nordea) removed this excellent feature and instead refer to having Visa 3D Secure verification, which basically only works in Sweden and is voluntary for the entity charging the credit card. Now I have to pay for two cards just to be able to do this.

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

#398

Post by tomascot »

ReverseCold wrote: post #260
alwan wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google support team is a python scripts. You cannot call someone and get real help.

Project Fi support is good, I got a human who solved my problem in less than 5 minutes. Also AdSense, but there's obvious reasons they support that.

Adwords, actually

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

#399

Post by bmpafa »

I got burned by firebase in a similar way. I was using their worker queue library and found my bill for a zero user app had gone from $0 to $100. Couldn't get a straight answer from support on why the worker queue was eating so much bandwidth.

Did some experiments and learned the queue downloaded every task in the queue each time it started. The authors assured me that wasn't the case at first, but eventually acknowledged that this was exactly how it worked.

Terrible experience overall, glad to have moved away from firebase.

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