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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

#211

Post by defined »

princekolt wrote: post #120
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…

Nowadays with some banks having virtual cards that you can create/kill at any moment, this sounds like a great idea.

I just started using privacy.com and so far it has been an excellent experience. They provide everything my previous VAN-providing CC company did, and more. The one and only downside is that at present, the VAN uses ACH debit to draw immediately any funds used; there's no credit as such (although they are looking into that).

EDIT: I have no affiliation with privacy.com; I'm just a satisfied user.

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

#212

Post by kartickv »

_asummers wrote: post #136
corford wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This works well in India, with 2-factor auth — Indian companies can't charge my debit or credit card just because they have the card number, expiry and CVV. I have to approve each transaction with my bank.

I'm wary of giving my card information to companies outside India because I don't have this protection.

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

#213

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mstade wrote: post #92
dkersten wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either. It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscripti…

This. I too dreaded the switch because of all the history, but the migration to fastmail was quick and painless, and I lost nothing. (Arguably, losing everything would've been better, so much useless noise in my history.) Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.

I just stopped by to join the little FastMail fan crowd over here.

If you aren't a FastMail customer yet, you're gonna assume we're shills. We're not, it's just the sort of quality product that makes you want to tell others. It's like having found Gmail in 2005.

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

#214

Post by specialp »

taneq wrote: post #171
daemin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Now in the USA as of 2012, banks cannot turn on overdraft protection on a debit card unless the customer requests. Prior to this they were taking your day's debits and applying the largest one first. So suppose you bought lunch for $10 and a coffee for $3 then your cable company later in the day billed you for an amount in excess of your account. They would then apply the cable company bill first, then the 2 smaller charges to maximize overdraft fees and hit you with 3 $30 charges.

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

#215

Post by brianwawok »

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…

Except the young ones that know how to use the tech, can go:

Hey this portion of my load is HIGHLY flexible. I can use a very simple celery queue to scale this out to 1000 preemptible instances, and pay literally peanuts to harness the power of 1000 computers for the 30 minutes I need it, then shut it down for the other 23.5 hours a day.

There are a wide range of ways to do things. From Heroku to Bare Metal to EC2 to Lambda to managed services (like Firebase). I think they all can be a win in the right case. If you are always using the same solution (in your case, maybe rented window servers?), I would heavily question if you are using the right tech. And personally as soon as I hear people running Windows to run actual code that does work, I shudder a bit.

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

#216

Post by ocdtrekkie »

brianwawok wrote: post #119
neftaly wrote: post #45

We've also gone from ~$25/mo to $1000-2000/mo with the pricing change. While it's not the end of the world (we're near shipping replacements for FB stuff anyway), there's also been 3-4 incidents of downtime (> 1 hour) in the last 2 months, with no way to contact anyone except their stupid web form.

Do you not pay for support? It starts at $150..

The idea of having to pay extra to talk to them about their screw up is pretty laughable.

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

#217

Post by vacri »

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.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Also, from the article, Firebase wasn't google when they went in, plus it was a side project that suddenly took off, not a thought-out business plan.

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

#218

Post by corford »

curiousgal wrote: post #209
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…

Google's ahead of you on that one. They don't accept debit cards. (At least the last time I tried with Google Cloud)

Interesting! For AWS, DO, Linode etc, I use a debit card with no problem.

Edit: just remembered we're using Google's Cloud Vision API and that's billed to the same debit card. So, for UK accounts at least, they take debit cards.

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

#219

Post by sethrin »

_e wrote: post #89
bbcbasic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail still rocks

I pay for G Suite and basically the only thing anyone uses is Gmail. I don't have hard proof but I feel that all of my emails from my domain never go to spam. I one time had to use Godaddy's email system and ALL emails went to people's spam folder. It is like Google makes you pay for email or your emails won't get delivered properly. Maybe it was Godaddy's mail system's IP that was blacklisted but I think you have to…

Is there some criterion by which GoDaddy is not the worst service provider? Given their popularity with domain parkers and other less savory parts of the IT world, I would assume that the blame was entirely on their shoulders. That said, configuring an email server correctly seems to be rather an involved process[0] so we should perhaps not rule out some measure of incompetence as well as shadiness.

[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/218615/mail-server-checkli...

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

#220

Post by kybernetikos »

elorant wrote: post #94
mgkimsal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences , but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'c…

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.

I believe that the standard approach for getting support from google is to hire an ex-googler who has good relationships with relevant people still at the company. It's ludicrous, but I've seen it work.
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