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Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

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Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#111

Post by silasdavis »

I was searching for 'cloudflare spending limits' based on comments here, at first glance they (like Vercel) seem to have a notify don't terminate policy.

What I didn't appreciate is static assets are completely free: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/pricing/#s...

So therefore I assume static cloudflare pages are free.

Incidentally Vercel does seem to have an (annoyingly indirect) way of halting usage based on spending: https://vercel.com/docs/accounts/spend-management

Has anyone implemented this, are there any problems with it?

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#112

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

factorialboy wrote: post #77
nindalf wrote: post #44

Since the author has gone viral I expect some netlify exec is going to take over and write this bill off to $0. In the words of Kramer “these big companies, they just write it off!” A moment of silence for the people who got DDoS-ed, didn’t go viral and still had to pay $5k.

You don't even know what a write-off is.

Neither did Kramer :D

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#113

Post by szundi »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #81
rafram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netli…

I would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.

Stunning

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#115

Post by mmaunder »

Netlify charge $55 per 100GB for overages on their starter plan. Keep in mind that they’re being billed by their provider at 95th percentile billing. That means they have ports running at say 100 gigabits per second and have a commit of say 50 gb/s and they’re billed a flat rate for that as long as they don’t go over. Because they’re billed 95th percentile they can spike their connection traffic massively for 5% of the time and not get billed more. So Netlify themselves have a safety net and don’t need real-time monitoring to immediately cut their usage. And of course any spikes from a single user are massively diluted among their entire user base. So, yeah, they’re gouging big time.

What they should have is monitoring per user and a default that 503s the site with no overages that has to be proactively disabled by the user. Instead they’re just letting it ride and trying their luck by negotiating down the overage charge to what they think the user can stomach.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#116

Post by pxeger1 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #64
rafram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netli…

That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything Except it doesn't cost them anything. The marginal cost of keeping your single instance running is $0 (unless they were 100% out of capacity and they could have sold that instance to someone else either at full price or spot price)

“There is a good chance it costs them $0” = “in expectation it costs them >$0”

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#119

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

This happened to me on a much smaller scale about a year back. I was never happier to have stuck to my guns, building my whole site with a single `hugo` command - it made it very easy to migrate off that platform for good.

If anyone has a solid bash one liner to stress test a website, so that I can test whether my cloud billing cap will work correctly if I accidentally try to egress 100 MB of data or something, I would seriously appreciate it. There was one on a blog post here like a year back, using apache iirc, but I forgot to bookmark it.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#120

Post by onion2k »

rafram wrote: post #38
dhaavi wrote: post #7

> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.

Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netli…

AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months.

This is an admission that their UX sucks and makes it hard to know what state your account is in and what you're paying for. They waive the fees because a few high profile cases of people paying thousands due to the AWS console being awful would drive a lot of customers away.

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