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

Accident Forgiveness

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 310 posts

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#201

Post by genewitch »

gwbas1c wrote: post #16

> and may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill. Whenever I've had to water new grass seed I've always been surprised by my water bill.

my well only costs me electricity and has no meter - well, i have a meter somewhere, i just never installed it. I know for a fact it uses 9A to run, so it would cost me 30¢ or so, all-in, to run it for an hour. it's somewhere around 10-12GPM, so 600-700 gallons for 30c

I've wanted to put it on solar the entire time i've had it but the start current is 18A and an inverter that can handle that is (or maybe was, idk) real expensive, considering.

anyhow if you saw the area around my house, in the dog days of summer, right now, you'd think it had been raining non-stop all summer - in fact, it hasn't really rained at all since the beginning of june when we had 12" - i've personally watered 6+" over about 1/3rd of an acre, so like 50,000 gallons since then.

edit: oh crap i forgot the reason i wanted to comment on this at all! My neighbor recently had some issues with a pipe running along the bottom of his house that sprung a leak and they got a surprise $600 water bill - no forgiveness. the water company did, in fact, have the audacity to tell my neighbor "there's a light on the meter if you have a leak." His meter is like a quarter mile from his house, first of all. and second of all, when they read the meter and saw the light, why didn't they go across the street and knock on his door, or make a note to call/mail?

I'll tell you why. $600

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#202

Post by genewitch »

wrs wrote: post #143
csours wrote: post #106

> " You probably can’t tell me how much electricity your home is using right now, and may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill. But neither of those bills are all that scary, because you assume there’s a limit to how much you could run them up in a single billing interval. " I had a $600 surprise water bill. It was (partially) forgiven because the water department could drive to m…

Water billing is indeed nonlinear with no cap. I had a surprise $3000 excess water bill due to a broken connection at the meter. Followed by a $3000 excess sewer bill (!) because the assumption is if I used $3000 of water, it must have gone down the drain. However, if you demonstrate to an inspector that the water must have leaked below ground (as in this case) there’s a process for getting the second charge waived.…

So, when they read the meter, and saw that it was flooded at the meter or nearby, they didn't think to mention that to you? I ask because you said "surprise bill" - another comment i made explains my neighbor's water meters have a light on them that lights up if there's a leak, which the meter reader can see and the homeowner usually cannot - the only reason to not notify the homeowner of an issue is because of $.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#203

Post by genewitch »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #196
tptacek wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am never going to get tired of telling people that if they can solve their problems running on Hetzner, they should do that. It's not like a dirty secret of our industry. By all means, deploy with VPSs! Or on bare metal servers!

Do you have a blog post on fly's blog where you tell people that?

i mentioned this as well in another comment to parent. Hopefully it catches on.

"Hey, SMB? you probably don't need our services. While AWS, GC, etc would be happy to take your money anyhow, [...]" I dunno. obviously any sort of thing like this has to clear all the departments because i imagine it increases support load.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#204

Post by tptacek »

genewitch wrote: post #203
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a blog post on fly's blog where you tell people that?

i mentioned this as well in another comment to parent. Hopefully it catches on. "Hey, SMB? you probably don't need our services. While AWS, GC, etc would be happy to take your money anyhow, [...]" I dunno. obviously any sort of thing like this has to clear all the departments because i imagine it increases support load.

No SMB is OK with us zapping their services because some screwed up deployment or stolen token exceeded a billing cap. You're not talking about SMBs, you're talking about people deploying random personal stuff. We love those people, we're happy to have them here, but we do not price the product specifically for them.

I get that this is a lot of venting about people's issues with cloud providers writ large, but damn.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#205

Post by jmathai »

morningsam wrote: post #3

>If you do something luridly stupid and rack up costs, AWS and GCP will probably cut you a break. [...] Everyone does. If the incidents that made the rounds here in the last few months are any indication, they'll start out insisting you pay no matter what. You'll then have to write a blog post about it, post it to Twitter, HN, and Reddit, get a couple hundred comments expressing anger at the provider, and wait for so…

I was a PM in GCP and refund requests due to customer misconfigurations would make it to me for approval.

Generally, I tried to make exceptions to grant the refund. It sucks to get these bills and they can be quite scary.

Unless you have a real chance of bursty traffic I suggest going with compute that has more predictable costs.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#206

Post by tomjen3 »

mappu wrote: post #102
tomjen3 wrote: post #11

I really, really wish there was just a way to put a hard limit on how much a cloud could charge me. I am never going to want to spend 200k of my personal money on some project on a cloud. Never. I don't even want my ant-based basket viewing project simulator to cost me 1 thousand dollars because it went viral and all clouds overcharge for bandwith. Just let me put in a limit.

You might be happier with a fixed-size VPS, instead of a cloud provider,

Thats a good point, however I might want to set limits higher than my normal usage, just not astronomically high.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#207

Post by tomjen3 »

commercialnix wrote: post #135
tomjen3 wrote: post #11

I really, really wish there was just a way to put a hard limit on how much a cloud could charge me. I am never going to want to spend 200k of my personal money on some project on a cloud. Never. I don't even want my ant-based basket viewing project simulator to cost me 1 thousand dollars because it went viral and all clouds overcharge for bandwith. Just let me put in a limit.

Would you be interested in a cloud provider that did not charge for inbound or responding (outbound in response) bandwidth?

Yes. Very much so. Or at least one that charged SANE rates. I get 100 mb outbound on my resident ISP, and that is unmetered, but clouds that sit almost directly on the backbone somehow charge a nontrivial amount of dollars per GB of bandwidth.

I only know of Hertzner.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#208

Post by naniwaduni »

tptacek wrote: post #195
naniwaduni wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reiterate that you are not unique in offering a service where the customer's desire for consistent billing and your willingness to provide it are at odds.

I don't believe you saw me say that.

The technical problem is not "we are operationally incapable of, say, getting someone else to underwrite insurance contracts". That's not a technical constraint, It's a business decision.

I get that the underlying issue is that your target consumer is whales who eat orders-of-magnitude pricing spreads as normal opex, and that anyone who comes in with a budget is barely a consideration. It's still absurd to pretend that pricing is too hard. Like, I'm not going to confidently assert "lol you can give up C, it'll be a rounding error anyway" but like, billing cycles are absurdly long on the scale of your technical constraints.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#209

Post by mixmastamyk »

tptacek wrote: post #71

Y'all really, really want caps. We think that's a crazy feature. We don't want to do it. But I just had this conversation on a Slack with a bunch of friends at other companies and they were just as yell-y about this. There's a threshold of feedback at which I think you could get us to do some kind of cap thingo. I'm just saying. Yeesh.

People keep implying a cap means “break/delete everything.” Not necessarily so?

It would make a lot more sense to throttle service, say 80% instead like ISPs do. Slow bandwidth/fewer cpus would raise flags without necessarily breaking anything.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#210

Post by tptacek »

naniwaduni wrote: post #208
tptacek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe you saw me say that.

The technical problem is not "we are operationally incapable of, say, getting someone else to underwrite insurance contracts". That's not a technical constraint, It's a business decision. I get that the underlying issue is that your target consumer is whales who eat orders-of-magnitude pricing spreads as normal opex, and that anyone who comes in with a budget is barely a consideration. It's still absurd to pretend th…

I don't think you've thought very carefully about this, because there are real technical problems here. If we did a cap feature, enabling it would involve disabling parts of our platform. We're just going to go back and forth on this, because I'm not going to write you an essay on this, and you're going to keep saying "it's a business decision" and I'm going to keep knowing you're wrong about that.

For the nth time on this thread: we don't make our quarterly nut billing people looking to spend $50/mo an occasional extra $1000. The people who actually pay the bills here do not want this feature.

They definitely want Accident Forgiveness, though. Which means it's going to cost us money to do this. And that's fine; they're growing, we're growing.

Post reply on HN