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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

#401

[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…

What support? Google has no support, ever. You care about "users" but don't give a shit about any one user.

I'm starting to really fucking hate Google.

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

#402

Sticking with my dedicated, almost went to GAE.. thanks for post.

I like GAE for low traffic websites. The free tier is quite generous, and can serve up a small business site (or 5), no problem. I run one for my personal site, and use it as a proxy to my home server.

Only problem is: You gotta play by their rules. The databases, in particular. Datastore was weird to get used to.

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

#403

[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…

What support? Google has no support, ever. You care about "users" but don't give a shit about any one user. I'm starting to really fucking hate Google.

[deleted]

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

#404

I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for renting equipment vs the cloud. I've never understood the advantages of these services except for when you have drastic usage changes throughout the day. But all the younger folks seem to think it's awesome: "Look ma, I didn't even need to register my own domain, w…

If you are, like me, not experienced with running servers I can see how going cloud helps getting started. I would have trouble setting up my own servers with backup, software and security. But it's probably good to start learning about these things so you can think about running your own servers.

If you're building web apps, you should learn about web servers. I realize that's an obvious statement, but a little can go a long way if you have no experience.

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

#405
post #394

[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…

This feels like a way to make more money off of developers. If you can't set a limit, you might end up spending more.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment. 16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is…

Thanks for sharing this. I had recently set up an account with FastMail, but now that it's clear that they won't abide by their own promises, I'll look elsewhere.

I would be cautious about extrapolating from that. Yes, it sounds like an unfortunate decision, but I've been a FastMail user for many years and have been very happy with them.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew, Firebase is great, you did a great job and looks like you are continuing to do so by engaging directly like now. Having said that, it's time you, your team or even the entire google start looking seriously at automating your support workflow. How on earth can such a popular product ignore support requests, whether it's via email or any other medium?, especially for paying users. You should have a CRM/CSM tool…

Clearly we have some work to do here!

This has been the case with every google product

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

#409
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's appalling because you're a paying customer. I can understand free services not having support, but any service that's costing money should at the very least have a human being responding through email.

But you KNOW going in - there's no support. You know this by a) hundreds and thousands of horror stories from people saying "I did not get any support from google". You can counter that with "here are people who did get support", but the existence of the thousands of support nightmare stories out there gives you enough evidence to know that this isn't really "supported" in the way you might expect. b) there are no ph…

Nothing you've said makes that any more acceptable. I don't care if we "know going in"; it's still unacceptable, and they should be investigated for it.

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

#410
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.

> It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences , but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'c…

I made it a point a long time ago to never use any SaaS, PaaS, or cloud solutions from Google for anything important. First off, their offerings tend to be much more expensive than competitors. Second, Google tends to randomly drop features, services, and support for applications without warning whenever they want. Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything. I use Linode for all of my hosting, and I can get tech support on the phone in less than 5 minutes even without the upgraded support plan. On top of this, Linode and DigitalOcean offer extensive community curated documentation for almost everything.

The above reasons are also why I don't use any open source software developed or maintained solely by Google. There's no guarantee that Google won't just stop maintaining it after a year or less. For a somewhat recent project, my co-founder and I evaluated using Angular2 for the front-end of our application. During our evaluation, we learned about Angular4. Knowing about what happened between Angular1 and Angular2, we decided to steer clear of the angular ecosystem. This decision also made more sense from the performance and ecosystem side of the argument. Most groups that develop open source software do their best to ensure that there is a well documented and simple upgrade path. Look at Django, rails, React, Vue, postgresql, etc for example. As far as I have experienced, Google products offer no such simple upgrade path.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what value Google is offering anymore. The only quality product from them I still find any use for is Gmail. Even Gmail has competitors that do Email better. I guess there's also youtube, but Google are kind of shitting that up as well.

I think the tech space needs to walk away from worshiping Google and Facebook. In all reality, the technical quality of their products is lacking and their entire goal is to lock both consumers and developers inside their own walled gardens.

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