Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#51

Post by tcgv »

paulgb wrote: post #23

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

Amazon provides Billing Alarms for monitoring charges, which is very useful for anticipating unplanned cost surges:

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#52

Post by StreamBright »

intricatedetail wrote: post #50

That's why I don't use cloud offerings. Their pricing models are designed to trap someone with a exorbitant bill and you don't have control over it. For example let's say you put an image on a CDN and someone who doesn't like you runs AB for a couple of days making billions of requests to bankrupt you or someone finds a page that runs costly queries and sets up curl against it. No thanks.

Interesting, I saved roughly 2M USD / year for customers moving them to the cloud. Your example is silly, all of the CDN I set up has very strict limit on how much a single IP can use and have multiple alerts if you are passing 100, 200, 500, etc. USD limits. On the top of that if that is not enough you can add more limitations to avoid that exact scenario that a public resource can be abused to cause you financial troubles. It won't "bankrupt" you if you do it right. Just like pretty much every other technology, you need to know it.

The other problem with your comment is that you try to make it sound like it was a single dimension decision to use the cloud. It is never a single dimension questions though.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#53

Post by StreamBright »

paulgb wrote: post #23

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

I guess you had not setup any budget alarms.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#54

Post by BartBoch »

StreamBright wrote: post #52
intricatedetail wrote: post #50

That's why I don't use cloud offerings. Their pricing models are designed to trap someone with a exorbitant bill and you don't have control over it. For example let's say you put an image on a CDN and someone who doesn't like you runs AB for a couple of days making billions of requests to bankrupt you or someone finds a page that runs costly queries and sets up curl against it. No thanks.

Interesting, I saved roughly 2M USD / year for customers moving them to the cloud. Your example is silly, all of the CDN I set up has very strict limit on how much a single IP can use and have multiple alerts if you are passing 100, 200, 500, etc. USD limits. On the top of that if that is not enough you can add more limitations to avoid that exact scenario that a public resource can be abused to cause you financial t…

Not taking sides here, but I think that the cloud is complicated enough (especially for a person that does not specialize in it), to miss one of the edge cases that can lead to the huge bill.

In a few minutes, I can set simple PHP script with curl, that will launch 100 requests each second, using a pool of hundreds of thousands of IP's thank to the rotating VPN.

This is an edge case of course, but it can happen.

I use cloud myself, but only cloud servers, which allows me to control budget better and provides me with an "escape plan", where I can just switch to dedicated quickly.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#55

Post by intricatedetail »

StreamBright wrote: post #52
intricatedetail wrote: post #50

That's why I don't use cloud offerings. Their pricing models are designed to trap someone with a exorbitant bill and you don't have control over it. For example let's say you put an image on a CDN and someone who doesn't like you runs AB for a couple of days making billions of requests to bankrupt you or someone finds a page that runs costly queries and sets up curl against it. No thanks.

Interesting, I saved roughly 2M USD / year for customers moving them to the cloud. Your example is silly, all of the CDN I set up has very strict limit on how much a single IP can use and have multiple alerts if you are passing 100, 200, 500, etc. USD limits. On the top of that if that is not enough you can add more limitations to avoid that exact scenario that a public resource can be abused to cause you financial t…

You see this is too complicated and "If you do it right" imply you can get it wrong and go bankrupt. I prefer to use dedicated server with dedicated bandwidth and Kubernetes on top of that. This makes me sleep comfortably at night. I tried the cloud and this was just too much anxiety for me to handle.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#56

Post by rajasimon »

comprev wrote: post #7
klaaz0r wrote: post #6

Offtopic I need to register with medium now to actually read the article?

It looks like you get 1 month "free". Open the article in incognito mode and it's available without registration.

They can also block you from the same IP I guess. can they?

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#57

Post by paulgb »

StreamBright wrote: post #53
paulgb wrote: post #23

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

I guess you had not setup any budget alarms.

The alarms are why it wasn't higher than 15x.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#58

Post by donmcronald »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #48
paulgb wrote: post #23

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

Only Amazon is adamant at refusing this, Microsoft already made it possible some years ago, and I believe Google too.

Azure doesn’t have it for pay as you go.

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/906772-cost-management/sug...

A 6+ year wait for such a reasonable feature sucks.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

rocqua wrote: post #37
klaaz0r wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can get passed it but damn it's become a mess, I understand they have to make money.

It seems we have a pretty fucked up cycle here: * Create quality service, prioritizing user experience over money * Grow site to significant user base * Start running out of money, because hosting and running a site does cost money * Try to monetize service * Get out-competed by another service still at step 1 The presence of VC money that's all about capturing market share now, and monetizing later does not help. In…

You're missing a step between "Try to monetize" and "Get outcompeted" - the "Service turns to user-abusing, steaming pile of hot garbage". This cycle does happen repeatedly (image sharing being a prime example), and services that die do so because their monetization strategies destroy almost all the good aspects.

I believe it's hard, but not impossible, to refrain from abusive monetization and stay afloat longer.

Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

#60

Post by grepthisab »

paulgb wrote: post #23

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

Same here, with AWS specifically. I'm used to AWS so generally stay in that ecosystem. Designed a web app and backed part of it by lambda and api gateway. Via a surge in traffic, my monthly bill went from about $6/mo to $150 for a month. Didn't catch it until I got the bill for the month, the timing of which meant my next month's bill was about $80.
Post reply on HN