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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

#191

Post by MaulingMonkey »

moduspol wrote: post #175
princekolt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd even settle for crediting affected accounts to help smooth out the transition reactively, which it sounded like they started to do.

But then they failed to follow through.

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

#192

Post by chiph »

corford wrote: post #126
mstade wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, let the providers take the risk. Typically, the providers will let it bounce a few times before cutting things off as well. This might just give you another week or two to sort things out, without having to lay out possibly significant funds that you may or may not be able to reclaim. I only wish setting up virtual cards were as easy as setting up a new mail box. I know there are services out there that lets…

To be honest, the best way is setting up a completely isolated account with card. If you're extra paranoid, use a different bank for this account.

Definitely use a different bank. A friend had a separate checking account for their PayPal purchases. And when PayPal clawed back some money (as they are wont to do), the bank manager helpfully transferred money into the account to avoid an overdraft charge.

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

#193

Post by jpalomaki »

kuschku wrote: post #44
stemuk wrote: post #37

Did a Firebase team member already comment on this? In a few hours Google will present some new Firebase features at io17, and I would expect them to avoid bad press now as much as possible...

That's probably the purpose of this post — the best way to get support from Google, after all, is still by posting a story on reddit, twitter or HN. Which is pretty sad.

I would assume you get the support if you pay for it. Google, Azure and AWS seem to have all gone the same way. You select the service level and pay monthly fee. I don't know if this support covers Firebase.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/

https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

#194

Post by mstade »

mgkimsal wrote: post #150
elorant wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's appalling because you're a paying customer. I can understand free services not having support, but any service that's costing money should at the very least have a human being responding through email.

But you KNOW going in - there's no support. You know this by a) hundreds and thousands of horror stories from people saying "I did not get any support from google". You can counter that with "here are people who did get support", but the existence of the thousands of support nightmare stories out there gives you enough evidence to know that this isn't really "supported" in the way you might expect. b) there are no ph…

> But you KNOW going in - there's no support.

I know this but to say everyone does or should isn't exactly fair. As well, you assume I am holding the purse strings, that I'm in any way responsible or even have a say in procurement. This may be true in my own business (it is) but not necessarily elsewhere, like my clients (it more often than not isn't) and you'll just have to live with poor decisions made on your behalf.

Also quite often, there's a sunk cost that makes switching that much harder. So no, it's not fair to say "Google has shitty support but that's ok because we all kind of know this." Paying customers can and should complain about this, loudly, shouting it from the roof tops. Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases.

Some semblance of professionalism shouldn't be too much to ask from one of the world's biggest corporations, an ask coming from paying customers no less.

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

#195

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

steego wrote: post #98
jakozaur wrote: post #4

Yet another example that Google so far doesn't get the public cloud and may have hard time to catch up with Amazon Web Services. E.g. shutdown Prediction APIs, charge 70x, not enough support. I believe Google got much better tech than AWS, but the culture, support and strategy has blind spots.

I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses. First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers). When you look at it through this lens, you ca…

*"customer obsessed business are tolerant of deprecating technology..."

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

#196

Post by stemuk »

redwood wrote: post #125
stemuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.

I was thinking the same thing. There's a giant circle of patting each other on the back every time they roll something out, and always have that very precise disclaimer that they work for the big G. Then again, as a meta comment I will point out that the fact that both you and I so clearly notice this suggest that we are following these updates much more closely then most of the folks here.

True, I used to be really interested in Firebase and their set of products. But because of several pretty bad experiences related to vendor lock-in and (very) high prices I switched over to an open source alternative.

It might not be so well known, but I found http://www.deepstream.io to have a relatively similar feature set, without having to deal with bad support (if it bothers you, just fix it yourself) and high prices, since you are the one who picks what suits you best.

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

#197

Post by jondubois »

josephg wrote: post #79
jondubois wrote: post #35

Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive (this applies to both Operational Transform and Differential Synchronization approaches). The price of Firebase was probably kept artificially low to attract new users but this was a ticking timebomb. Those people/companies who are using Firebase as their primary database are going to suffer now. It should really only be used for specific applications where…

> Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive No, its not. I was responsible for implementing, deploying and managing the infrastructure at lever.co when we were a tiny fledgeling startup. The entire application is built on top of JSON OT. I took some measurements at one point when we had ~thousands of active browser sessions of our app. At the time we were seeing about 1-2 OT merges (transform + re-…

I guess it somewhat depends what kind of OT we're talking about (text or JSON). In any case, I don't think that the bottleneck would be the OT algorithm itself - More likely, the bottleneck would be the number of messages (HTTP requests or WebSocket frames) required to send each individual operation between the client and server. If you have text-based OT and you send an operation over the wire each time a user presses a key, and if you do this for every single input field in your app, it's going to add up. Not saying it's not feasible but it's not going to be as fast as making a plain REST call for those use cases that don't require synching. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if OT turns out to be much faster than differential transform in terms of raw algorithm speed but again I think the bottleneck will be the number of frames/requests that need to go over the wire.

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

#198

Post by maxxxxx »

IanDrake wrote: post #100

I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for renting equipment vs the cloud. I've never understood the advantages of these services except for when you have drastic usage changes throughout the day. But all the younger folks seem to think it's awesome: "Look ma, I didn't even need to register my own domain, w…

If you are, like me, not experienced with running servers I can see how going cloud helps getting started. I would have trouble setting up my own servers with backup, software and security. But it's probably good to start learning about these things so you can think about running your own servers.

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

#200

Post by williamle8300 »

The price spike is dramatic... but is anyone actually surprised? Firebase is holding all the cards and users are expecting them to not play their hand. It's silly.

The solution is to build your own infrastructure. If you don't have the resources to do that, then find a lower-cost competitor.

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