[Firebase founder] This new database has been in the works for 2.5 years, since shortly after we joined Google. It was developed in close collaboration with the Cloud Datastore[1] team, and uses Google’s core database infrastructure. We built it because we know it can be challenging to build complex apps with our original database -- Firebase Realtime Database -- where we optimized for ease-of-use & real-time sync ov…
How goes the work to improve customer service and support? Thinking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801 , what improvements have you made in the last 139 days that would make us want to build on this?
Bug 1: we under-reported bandwidth (in particular SSL overhead)
Bug 2: we were not enforcing quotas for all accounts.
For most users, the fixes had little-to-no impact. For a few users who were using the Realtime Database with large volumes of small reads and writes, the impact was large. You could mitigate this impact by updating your client code, but unfortunately a user who had shipped code to their IoT devices couldn’t. This user was also simultaneously forced to upgrade to the Blaze pay-as-you-go plan due to quota enforcement on our $25/mo Flame plan. These combined resulted into a large billing increase for this user. We weren’t quick enough to provide this user with credits due to poor internal communication).
To address these we have (1) worked to make billing more transparent on Realtime Database and (2) are working on improving support.
1a. We rewrote our documentation to add more detail on billing mechanics and how to optimize bandwidth (https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/usage/billing).
1b. We rewrote the documentation for our profiler tool which was confusing to many developers (https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/usage/profile).
1c. We now have better alerting for if/when we find errors in our codebase that can impact their bill (up or down).
1d. We will soon be releasing (spoiler alert) a new monitoring API to let developers directly analyze their database billing and performance data.
2a. We raised the quota on free technical questions from 5 => 10. Questions on accounts/billing/bug reports are still unlimited
2b. We worked to increase Support CSAT. It is up by 15% since the billing issue in May.
Finally, the new database we’re launching today, Cloud Firestore, has daily budgets. You can use these to set exactly how much you’re willing to spend per day (more here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/usage#limits) We’ve also got extensive pricing docs: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pricing
I hope this answers your question!