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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

#251

Post by holtalanm »

jakub_g wrote: post #131

> It was extremely hard to write this article for fear of being looked down upon for our mistakes. I can only hope that some of you may learn from our embarrassing mistakes and implement solutions to the growing problem of service trap. Kudos for writing it down. This kind of cautionary articles are very valuable and much needed. Moreover, getting to front page of HN is one of the very few ways to have your case reso…

I don't think this should be considered embarrassing. It is a situation that almost anyone could find themselves in, and it sucks.

Honestly, the fault it purely with Firebase.

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

#252

Post by ceejayoz »

octo_t wrote: post #10

I find it hard to reconcile this suggestion at the bottom of the article > Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path! - Build without depending on external services - You can do this by depending on this external service

Lambda functions can be built in a pretty portable manner. You can build and test them locally, after all.

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

#253

Post by IanDrake »

brianwawok wrote: post #215
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…

I think I exempted the exact scenario you mentioned.

Windows, like Linux, is a great OS, IF you know what you're doing and a terrible OS IF you don't.

My point is, hardware matters and abstracting it has real cost in terms of control, performance, and dollars as the OP has now learned.

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

#254

Post by brazzledazzle »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #183
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.

Providers to some degree get a free pass when they do their best to fix their mistakes. In Gitlab's case, their response was excellent and their total data loss was less than a day's work - and even that only for a full time manipulator of gitlab metadata (project managers? some parts of QA?): "Database data such as projects, issues, snippets, etc. created between January 31st 17:20 UTC and 23:30 UTC has been lost. G…

Chances are they also knew when they fixed the bug that it would result in price hikes. They could have easily generated a report showing which customers would be impacted, allowing them to contact them ahead of time.

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

#255

Post by steego »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #195
steego wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..."

Yes. That's what I meant.

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

#256

Post by jayd16 »

The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure. Not to mention they would have been paying the full costs of their bandwidth from the start.

The real lesson to learn here is to never hit a paid service going through a domain you don't control. DNS and proxy tricks would have saved the day.

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

#257

Post by snuxoll »

yeukhon wrote: post #176
corford wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, their mobile app alerts me the moment a recurring charge posts for a different amount than normal, if I put my NYT delivery on hold for travel or something I can guarantee the next two months I'll get an alert to review the transaction (though they don't outright block it)

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

#258

Post by cwmma »

tamalsaha001 wrote: post #169
cwmma wrote: post #71

They said the issue was due to TLS tickets and not setting keep alive values. TLS tickets are await of resuming a TLS session without having to renegotiate it, considering that you are only polling for a boolean, that negotiation overhead could be much greater then the actual being passed. This isn't something specific to firebase so that's why no library would mention it. Keep alive is a flag that allows you to reus…

Interestingly I was researching TLS forward secrecy. And the recommendation seems to be to disable tls tickets. https://timtaubert.de/blog/2014/11/the-sad-state-of-server-s...

probably not something they need to worry about here as it's just polling for booleans so forward security is probably not as high a priority as other use cases.

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

#259

Post by smeyer »

danellis wrote: post #237
specialp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The order wouldn't matter in that case, would it? Either way it's still deducting the sum of those three transactions at the end of the day. I thought what they were doing is applying all your debits, charging you if that puts you into overdraft, and then applying any credits. If they applied the credits first, you wouldn't go below zero.

The order still matters. If you have $20 in your account and get hit with three debits for $6, $10, and then $30, processing them in order means the $6 and $10 debits go through, leaving you with $4 in the bank, then the $30 debit causes an overdraft and a single fee. Comparatively, processing the $30 debit first immediately causes an overdraft, and the $10 and $6 debits cause two more overdrafts for three total fees.

Either way, you're trying to charge $46 against an account with $20, but one method results in 1 fee and one method results in 3 fees. The issue of credits vs debits you mentioned can compound this issue.

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

#260

Post by ReverseCold »

alwan wrote: post #184
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…

Google support team is a python scripts. You cannot call someone and get real help.

Project Fi support is good, I got a human who solved my problem in less than 5 minutes.

Also AdSense, but there's obvious reasons they support that.

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