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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

#441

Post by ccorda »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #438
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's great that you're going to help the one guy who amassed a bully pulpit here on HN. I have a question though...Why does Firebase charge ONE DOLLAR per gigabyte? 1995 called and wants their business model back. This alone has limited my use of Firebase to Dynamic Linking for my app. Not that my app is going to smash any records, but paying customers are a good thing to get, aren't they?

The $1/gb includes all queries, something that you'd get charged for with say DynamoDB for both read/write queries and for reserving capacity.

That said I would be curious why storage is so expensive compared to DynamoDB ($5/gb/mo storage vs. $0.25/gb/mo).

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

#443

Post by smnrchrds »

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.

Does anyone offer this service in Canada?

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

#444

Post by ruslan_talpa »

troncheadle wrote: post #421

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.

Can you replicate it and open source it tomorrow afternoon please? :) I'll pay for your time.

While what they did was certainly a dick move, this type of comments trivzializes and diminishes the work the firebase engineers put it. Incidentally it also implies that google is full of stupid execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon.

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

#445

Post by radiowave »

dozzie wrote: post #436
mseebach wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, this approach only works if you're happy to have your service cut off more or less abruptly if your card bounces, something the author of the article explicitly mentions isn't an option. The problem (in the article at least) isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.

> The problem [...] isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning. Sorry, but this is the risk of using somebody else's service -- especially Google's -- as a critical component of a business. It may be marvellous for developers not to bother with infrastructure for their own service, but this strategy likes to come back and bite in the ass.

You always have to use someone else's service - even if it's just the electricty supply. But different services come with different risks, and you have to try to gauge them.

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

#446

Post by mcherm »

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…

> We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue.

That gets to the heart of the issue -- I think most people believe that if there had been an effective channel for communicating then the issue would never have been such a problem. But "we'll be working directly with this developer" only solves ONE PERSON'S problem. The message I would like to see you taking from this is that your team needs a better way for ALL users to reach out for support in those situations where the support is necessary.

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

#447

Post by sushid »

sergior wrote: post #358
tschellenbach wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Where can you get devops for $1? I'm talking about actual DevOps, not a Mechanical Turk version of Jenkins.

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

#448

Post by victorhooi »

yeukhon wrote: post #190
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…

Apparently time after time stories arise with Googlr lack of support and are very slow at answering ans helping. In this very damn case no freakin' response. Often people have to get a Googler to initiate a Hello wothin the organization. So while we respect you doing your day work, we think your organization as a whole fail at customer support. Yeah I have read sicceyss stories too but many of them seen to be busines…

Often, these types of blog posts only present one side of the story - so I would caution a bit of patience, to see the full story. This applies no matter what company is at the other end - whether it's us, Amazon, Facebook etc. In this case, I know there's a few technical details missing - I won't comment further on this specific issue, as far more qualified people than me are already on this issue =).

Many times, I've seen it's due to a misunderstandings, or crossed-wires regarding technical issues.

And yes, our support team does provide refunds in many cases - I know, because these sometimes get escalated to me to approve (e.g. if they're borderline). I think one was actually offered already in this case, but there may have been a misunderstanding or mix-up around that.

And yes, we have a "paid" support service - it's actually comes free with any GSuite subscription (even at the most basic level, which I think is like $5 a month). You can chat, email, or phone. I work as an engineer in the team that supports this.

For GCP (our cloud offerings), the support offering is a paid offering:

https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

#449

Post by manigandham »

jhall1468 wrote: post #294
manigandham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Amazon guys will leave money on the table What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit, there's lot of thought that goes into their pricing and you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money.

> they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit Actually they are. Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains. Increasing prices helps your short term profit, but you tend to lose customers to competitors. Decreasing prices means less profit right now, but you tend to convert more customers. Companies aren't purely RIGHT NOW profit-driven. That's why many…

The timeframe does not change between my first phrase and the last. Overall (as in lifetime) the company is maximizing profits (as companies are designed to do). They certainly aren't "leaving money on the table" unless it's a plan to extract even more, so I don't see why that's so great as the GP comment says. They're good competition for the industry but I don't understand how their pricing automatically engenders trust. Also value is not equal to price and many major companies understand that absolute price is rarely the significant factor.

> Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains.

That would actually be maximizing profit...

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

#450

Post by victorhooi »

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…

Regarding your first issue - I'm sorry to hear you had documentation issues.

There should be a huge "Send Feedback" widget at the bottom of every single documentation page:

http://i.imgur.com/MhWbY0W.png

http://i.imgur.com/Gu8GzLB.png (If you click it, it will pop up this modal form, which also allows you to just screenshot the offending part).

Did you try using this link on any of the pages that you found unhelpful, or bizarrely organised?

I'd encourage you to use this - as all of this feedback comes through to us via an internal system, and it does get reviewed (although I'm sure you can imagine the volume).

Otherwise feel free to reach out to me if you have specific concerns and feel more comfortable doing it that way, or you're unsure about the response you received. (Although quite frankly, I think the form is best, as that gets tracked, and anybody can jump on it).

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