A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by danholevoet » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

factsaresacred wrote: post #420

danholevoet wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 betw…

Yes, I understand completely. The intent of the limit is obviously not to discourage legitimate issues from reaching our team. Limits like this are a blunt instrument, and it's possible that the time has come to remove it.

I can't promise a change immediately, but I am taking a very close look at what we can do here.

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

#472

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

factsaresacred wrote: post #420

danholevoet wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 betw…

[deleted]

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

#473

Post by sergior » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

sushid wrote: post #447

sergior wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jokes aside, you could get an apprentice for free

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

#474

Post by px1999 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

Stories like there are why I won't consider Google as an infrastructure provider for our SaaS, regardless of the technicals around their services. Thank you to the original author/s for writing the post, it reinforces the warning to avoid providers like this.

In HomeAutomation's case, the amounts are relatively small (though still potentially massive to them). If their monthly infra spend for firebase started out at $10k a month and went to $1m, would only way to have issues resolved still be to hit the front page of HN?

Risk factors into our technical decisions, and trust factors into risk. Particularly when billing is concerned, needing to wait a month is ridiculous. Assuming the post is accurate, ignoring billing-related emails is inexcusable. Any organisation this incompetent is one that you should not trust with your critical infrastructure.

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

#475

Post by derekp7 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

disconnected wrote: post #286

snomad wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options. I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human custome…

So naive. That's not how you get support in this day and age. You get support by kicking up a storm on social media. Shout far and wide (twitter, facebook, reddit, etc) that [Big corporation] is screwing you. If you can give it some sort of spin - like racism or gender equality - all the better. Just kick up as much of a storm as you can. I guarantee that [Big corporation] will be forced to respond. (I say this semi-…

That only works if you have a large enough audience, or if you are lucky enough to get a post upvoted enough to get proper exposure.

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

#476

Post by Macha » Wed, May 17, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #218

curiousgal wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's ahead of you on that one. They don't accept debit cards. (At least the last time I tried with Google Cloud)

Interesting! For AWS, DO, Linode etc, I use a debit card with no problem. Edit: just remembered we're using Google's Cloud Vision API and that's billed to the same debit card. So, for UK accounts at least, they take debit cards.

Maybe it's a regional thing? Most banks here (Ireland) issue debit cards by default and most people don't go out of their way to get a credit card, so they'd be cutting off a large chunk of their customer base by banning debit cards.

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

#477

Post by dasil003 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

ioquatix wrote: post #224

bitexploder wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take them to small claims court, if you have a legitimate grievance. In most jurisdictions a lawyer cannot represent a defendant. At best it will get them moving. It will be sure to at least make them take notice, even if you you have at least costed them and made them account for your grievance. edit: Meant, even if you lose you have cost them significantly an that has the intended effect of signaling they should im…

That sounds like a good way to ensure your access to every Google service gets permanently revoked.

If it was the only way to recover several thousand dollars that they stuck me with I'd absolutely do it, and make sure to do a couple orders magnitude more damage to them with widespread recommendation of AWS, Azure, Linode and basically anyone but Google. It'll catch up to them eventually.

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

#478

Post by dchichkov » Wed, May 17, 2017, 10:49 PM UTC

solomatov wrote: post #276

GFischer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some individual Google employees are very helpful and open. Unfortunately Google as a company and their corporate practices are nothing like that.

Some of their teams, for example tensorflow, are very very helpful.

Yes. They are in the "Embrace" phase of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Sure they are helpful. Have to be (considering the API drift between the Tensorflow releases and how late they were - Theano is the same exact idea and great implementation, only first released in 2009-ish).

But it's pretty easy to look a bit into the future, and predict what we would see during "Extend and Extinguish" phases of TensorFlow project.

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

#479

Post by theWatcher37 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

tehwebguy wrote: post #390

mayop100 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All fair points and things we're working on. We do often give credits to help in situations like this, though I can't speak to specifics publicly. We're working with this developer to try to resolve the issue, and we'll do so with other users who run into similar problems. This user did contact support, but we dropped the ball here. We'll be reviewing our support to find other devs we might have missed.

Your responses are encouraging. Hopefully the customer service example you set today will be followed by the rest of Google!

I'm sure it will be followed the next time a post reaches the front of HN

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

#480

Post by mstade » Thu, May 18, 2017, 12:52 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #291

_asummers wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this all sounds like it should be a primary bank feature. I should be able to cap a recurring payment at $X for a specific vendor otherwise have it go through automatically.

My bank (in Sweden) lets me generate virtual debit card numbers with a specified cost cap and expiration date. It's some ancient-looking Flash widget though so I suspect it's a legacy feature...

I'm in Sweden – which bank is this?