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

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

#171

Post by taneq »

daemin wrote: post #116
corford wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Solution: get a separate debit (not credit!) card for all cloud stuff. Make sure you only transfer enough money on to it each month to cover what you reasonably expect your bills to be (and that you can quickly top it up in hours if you legitimately need to). Worst case, if AWS or Google decide to fuck you over, let the bill bounce. This way you've still got funds on hand to deal wi…

Or the bank can just automatically give you an overdraft for that amount, add some fees because you accessed that facility, and require you to pay the full amount. After all, they're just being helpful in managing your money and paying your suppliers.

Can you not ask the bank not to do this, though?

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

#172

Post by jbob2000 »

delhanty wrote: post #164
shaqbert wrote: post #7

Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve a…

Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment. 16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is…

There could be technical issues with keeping grandfathered plans around. Maybe the 16mb email accounts were on an old system that was getting increasingly difficult to maintain?

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

#173

Post by yeukhon »

corford wrote: post #105
flipp3r wrote: post #14

Reminds me of getting Bait-and-Switch'd by Google App Engine in 2011. From 10's of euros to 1000's. > 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. Sounds like Google did a great job with Firebase. Definitely gives you that Google-feel of unresponsi…

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Solution: get a separate debit (not credit!) card for all cloud stuff. Make sure you only transfer enough money on to it each month to cover what you reasonably expect your bills to be (and that you can quickly top it up in hours if you legitimately need to). Worst case, if AWS or Google decide to fuck you over, let the bill bounce. This way you've still got funds on hand to deal wi…

I thought either way you get oversrafted fee or at least in the case of a debit card unless the card comes with a cap limit.

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

#174

Post by mseebach »

corford wrote: post #105
flipp3r wrote: post #14

Reminds me of getting Bait-and-Switch'd by Google App Engine in 2011. From 10's of euros to 1000's. > 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. Sounds like Google did a great job with Firebase. Definitely gives you that Google-feel of unresponsi…

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Solution: get a separate debit (not credit!) card for all cloud stuff. Make sure you only transfer enough money on to it each month to cover what you reasonably expect your bills to be (and that you can quickly top it up in hours if you legitimately need to). Worst case, if AWS or Google decide to fuck you over, let the bill bounce. This way you've still got funds on hand to deal wi…

Of course, this approach only works if you're happy to have your service cut off more or less abruptly if your card bounces, something the author of the article explicitly mentions isn't an option.

The problem (in the article at least) isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.

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

#175

Post by moduspol »

princekolt wrote: post #128
moduspol wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it looks like the service provider hadn't taken into account an oddball use case in the pricing / metering, and then suddenly did. They certainly should have communicated that better and their tools / charts should have a way of showing the billable data, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it vendor lock-in. It's not like everyone on Firebase is complaining and the author admits they made major mistakes.

But why do providers get a free pass when they do a major mistake (à la GitLab losing tons of not-backed-up data), but customers are required to accept whatever the provider throws at them? It seems pretty unfair to me.

I don't think they should get a free pass, but I don't think they should be beholden forever to be under-metering traffic if they made a mistake and weren't counting part of it (as it seems to be the case here).

To that extent, they should have communicated this better, ideally 90 days out perhaps even with phone calls for customers whose bill will increase notably.

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

#176

Post by yeukhon »

corford wrote: post #147
_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 personal bank sort of gives me that with their fraud protection. If a one off huge charge appears from a company that regularly bills me (but at much smaller amounts), their fraud system sends a text asking if I want to authorise or block the charge. The second bank account is really more for protecting you against black swan events. If all your accounts are under the same bank and have the same owner, there's not…

CaptialOne does this pretty well. So far it is the only bank I have come across would alert me they are blocking the transaction for a few days so I have a chance to review and if I don't they will release the block. Every 6 months or so they have someone called me up to verify recent transactions.

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

#178

Post by pg_bot »

Evaluation of technologies is an important skill for any developer to learn. Lock-in on a proprietary technology that powers your company should be a giant red flag. In some cases, you are obligated to use a third party (Payment Processing) but if it is a core part of your business you should really think about why you are unable to do it yourself. I've seen a few demos of firebase before and while their demos are highly polished, there is nothing they offer that couldn't be done by open source tools.

A hard lesson learned, but hopefully this company will pull through.

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

#179

Post by delhanty »

delhanty wrote: post #164
shaqbert wrote: post #7

Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve a…

Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment. 16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is…

I decided to submit the link that I gave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14357859

I'm not sure whether my chosen title follows HN guidelines - admins please feel free to edit

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

#180

Post by brango »

jazoom wrote: post #132
dutchbrit wrote: post #85

Is there any open source product that offers everything that firebase does?

From the article: >Always heavily consider open source alternatives (something which didn’t exist for Firebase at the time… but now alternatives like Horizon and Backendless exist, for example.

Looks like you have to pay for Backendless. I can't see an open source version. Also, Horizon looks dead.
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