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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

#411

Post by rhodysurf »

matrix wrote: post #385
rhodysurf wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think these billing limits only apply to AppEngine services.

Ahh I think you are right. Just checked and you can set limits for App engine, but there are budgets in Google Cloud which is confusing and doesn't seem like it actually limits anything, it just keeps you notified of how much you are spending relative to your budget

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

#412

Post by geekme »

tscanausa wrote: post #297
somewhatoff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For me it was running instances that didn't respond to requests to delete or stop. They kept charging anyway. Support was somebody in a different timezone who complained when I didn't answer my phone in the middle of the night. I quite liked the Google Cloud offering, but to get so burnt so quickly... stay away.

Sorry to hear about this. I work for our cloud platform support team ( we don't cover firebsse) and this is not the impression we want our customers to get. We don't want to be calling customers in the middle of their night while they are sleeping. Its not an effective way to resolve issues. We need help identifying when we fall short so we can fix the issues. Ways to let us know: 1) fill out the survey when your cas…

Surprise there is a support team!

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

#413

Post by hl5 »

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…

So the sudden 7000% cost increase is just the normal course of business due to a bug? Wow, great business plan -- tell them the first one's free ..then they pay.

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

#414

Post by brianpgordon »

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.

Bank of America has this in the US.

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

#415

Post by nulagrithom »

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…

I don't understand.

> The Firebase Realtime Database charges for SSL overhead on all requests ... We’ve always had a policy of charging this way.

So it's always been charged.

> Unfortunately, we introduced a bug late last year that began undercharging for SSL

Except it hasn't always been charged?

> We recently started actually enforcing overages on legacy plans and our current fixed-price ($25/mo Flame) plan.

In fact, if you're on a Spark or Flame plan, it's never been charged?

I feel like this response is straight from Office Space or something. "So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."

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

#416

Post by joshuamorton »

Top19 wrote: post #263
victorhooi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you said is quite untrue. I know - because I am one of those humans in support grins . I work in the support organisation for GSuite (formerly Google Apps). And I work across the hall from the guys who support GCP (Google Cloud Platform). And there are an entire army of us, helping support many, many enterprise customers. Even our consumer products have real people manning support phones - I know, because I've h…

I hired a freelancer from the Philippines on Upwork to work with me on some Google App Engine issues because Google's documentation is incredibly unhelpful at times and as well as bizarrely organized. He was from the Philippines, and it turned out he was a contractor providing "support" for Google Cloud. So I guess Google is outsourcing their support? Isn't this something Dell tried to do in the 90's with disastrous…

(am an eng at google)

How else do you provide 24/7 support?

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

#417

Post by Veratyr »

omgwhat wrote: post #401
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…

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.

Google doesn't have support for free products but they certainly do for paid. Whether the support is good or not is another question but it's there.

Just go to https://support.google.com/googleplay/?hl=en and click "Contact Us" in the top right. All the menu items I clicked that don't have straightforward solutions went straight to a menu where within 2-3 minutes I can get live chat or a phone call.

I've also had no problems getting help with my paid Google Apps account when I need it. For cloud there's paid support with a 4-hour response time: https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

#418

Post by eridius »

muraiki wrote: post #274
delhanty wrote: post #164

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 think you're being a bit hasty. This is literally the first negative thing I've seen anyone post about FastMail, and my experience as a customer of theirs has been fantastic.

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

#420

Post by factsaresacred »

danholevoet wrote: post #391
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, a…

Thanks for explanation, Dan. My issue is that the switch to the 3.x SDK and moving my assets to Firebase hosting depleted 4 of my 'technical troubleshooting questions' (two of those were bug reports which seem to no longer deduct from the five-a-year limit).

So now I'm looking at a message telling me that 'for all urgent requests...you have 1 question remaining' and hoping that nothing bad happens more than once between now and whenever you decide to allow me, a paying customer, to ask for help again.

To make clear: 99.9% of the time Firebase just works, which is great. And when I did receive support, it was excellent. It's the support model that's weak. Making billing and bug reports unlimited while limiting urgent requests to five a year is poor policy, and not very useful - for your customers at least.

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