I have to say... I don't understand what about Firebase's offering is SO killer or unique. I feel like it would be very easy to roll one's own custom 'Firebase.' I'm unsure as to why anyone would ever choose to predicate their businesses continued existence on another platform, especially one that can be replicated in like, an afternoon.
A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
421–430 of 516 posts
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably the purpose of this post — the best way to get support from Google, after all, is still by posting a story on reddit, twitter or HN. Which is pretty sad.
I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.
Or it's just engineers that swarm around since that's the demographic here but this needs a response from PR, not from engineering. What do you want google/firebase engineers to say?
The engineering response is pretty clear-cut. Polling every minute from an uncached SSL connection is expensive, don't do that. That's pretty obvious and the author admits this was a mistake. The complaint is about everything that's not the engineering part - support & communication.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#423Earlier 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.
For those interested in this concept in other countries, check out the SudoPay app which lets you spin up and spin down virtual cards just like this.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#424[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…
This problem was posted on stackoverflow 9(!) months ago http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38959321/firebase-databas...
It has been updated recently: "After 9 months of back-and-forth emails (over 40 emails), Google has acknowledged that they have found some bugs that may be responsible for high bandwidth usage, but bandwidth usage is still too high. Resolving this issue does no appear to be a priority for Google/Firebase (it took them 1.5 months to respond to the last email)."
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They do have support. I was stuck once with a friendly fella, that spent 45+ minutes talking about weather and weekend adventures to me, rather than solving my issue. It took less than 5 minutes to solve the issue, almost an hour of talk time. I would even bet money that the guy was heavily stoned.
At the end he asked me to provide positive feedback to him in exchange for friendly service. He said he will redirect me somewhere and I should give him a proper feedback. This is even while I was telling me I have no time and this is an urgent matter. At the end of the call it turned out it took him 5 minutes to solve the issue and he just wanted to chat while I was stuck at talking to him, thinking he is waiting for a solution to propagate.
I can't say this is a good support.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#426I can appreciate the appeal of a Backend-as-a-Service offering like Firebase, particularly if you're a one-person frontend-heavy dev team; it seems like it gives you a lot of leverage in the early experimentation stages. I'd like to play with it some day soon.
But this sort of incident really underscores the business value of having an exit strategy from whatever cloud you're running in.
That's why I like Kubernetes, since you can just spin up a new cluster on whatever cloud you want (or on-prem), and all your app deploy scripts remain the same.
Likewise for the choice of boring data store (Postgres/MySQL). I'm happy to pay a cloud provider to run my DB for me, because I know I can trivially redeploy in another hosted DBaaS or on-prem solution if I had a need to do so.
You could make the same case for running your stack on VMs that you manage; pick your poison.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#427[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…
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…
I can only guess from my limited experience talking to people at Google and reading about their systems, but I would guess the problem is over-automation of customer support.
I also wonder who shifts through the tickets themselves. Is it the engineer straight out of Stanford with 150k combined compensation and no serious training in customer satisfaction? The curious developer who built the product and wanted to see what people thought of his/her baby? A lower paid employee in a country with a lower cost of living? Some combination of the three? I feel like the culture at Google might preclude it from ever having good customer support except for the highest paying customers.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 hear you. I've made an exception on angular2, partially because it's being baked in to some other tools I use, and I think those communities will help support it as well. And from what I can tell, the 'a2->a3->a4' is much more minor support numbering vs the "everything is redone" from a1->a2.
But this is a somewhat easier choice to make because I still have the code locally. Google could stop supporting it tomorrow, and it would not be fun, but things wouldn't stop working, unlike the firebase situation above, where the option is "turn off your app".
That said, I've generally been using knockout and vue (more vue recently than knockout) and both have been fine.
"Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything". There's a lot of people on this thread that feel like because they're paying for something they should get support. And... while I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint, and agree they should, we've had 10+ years of seeing google consistently under- or non- support many services that people seem to want to base their entire businesses on.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#429Earlier 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.
For those interested in this concept in other countries, check out the SudoPay app which lets you spin up and spin down virtual cards just like this.
And before you get your hopes up, it's IOS only =(
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure who you bank with but our bank will bounce it if honouring it would require going overdrawn beyond €500.
There are limits to overdraw facilities, sure. But they are also included by default in many accounts.
You can usually have them turn off the ability to overdraw.