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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

#321

Post by tschellenbach »

sergior wrote: post #308
twic wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. "We went from a Skype group of 10 beta testers to hundreds of active users, then thousands in only a few short months." Getting off the ground required supporting thous…

And that machine could serve all the traffic they need and also pay full time dev op guy if needed still for fraction of the cost of the cloud

Seems hard at $25 a month :)

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

#324

Post by soneil »

disconnected wrote: post #286
snomad wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human custome…

So naive. That's not how you get support in this day and age. You get support by kicking up a storm on social media. Shout far and wide (twitter, facebook, reddit, etc) that [Big corporation] is screwing you. If you can give it some sort of spin - like racism or gender equality - all the better. Just kick up as much of a storm as you can. I guarantee that [Big corporation] will be forced to respond. (I say this semi-…

As far as I can tell, that's pretty much what this post is.

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

#325

Post by franciscop »

YCode wrote: post #295
roadbeats wrote: post #165

I have a game being mostly used by kids and it doesn't generate revenue, and it has been in the free tier of Firebase for about 2 years. This month suddenly my account got disabled due to DB usage (I only keep sessions and ids, still can't believe I exceeded DB usage). But the traffic was same as old. About 1.5 weeks ago I woke up at 6am with an e-mail telling me my account was disabled. And I had to switch to someth…

They don't seem to understand that once you lose trust and reputation in a community you will struggle to get it back. For example this thread has more or less convinced me to take Firebase off the table for any future projects I might have used it for.

Exactly, for me Firebase was among those "group of cool tech I might want to try/use someday" and now it's off that list. I actually try a couple of things from thay list per month, so it's not one of those ever-growing lists.

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

#326

Post by mstade »

mgkimsal wrote: post #300
mstade wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I've missed your point now – what are you actually trying to say? That Google being unprofessional and delivering on the whole sub-par services is OK because a lot (but not all) people already know this, and so really paying customers should just suck it up or go elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they even can in the first place? If I've misrepresented what you're trying to say here please do correct me, be…

I think it's shitty. But it's also avoidable. But to avoid it, you generally do research ahead of time. And/or be willing to actually walk away from your 'investment' on their platform and start again somewhere else. In the OP case, they didn't sign up with google in the first place. It's doubly shitty for them, because they didn't ask for this, and could not have known in advance that google would end up being the s…

Sure but voting with your wallet isn't, as mentioned previously, always an option for various reasons. Shouting from the roof tops is little recourse, I agree, but if nothing else it can be cathartic. I don't think that should be discouraged.

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

#327

Post by pluma »

grenoire wrote: post #170
ninju wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/alphabet-google-evil/ ... The new code of conduct has a close approximation of the philosophy—though perhaps more formally phrased—in the very first sentence of the preface: "Employees of Alphabet... should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect."

"treat each other with respect" Sounds like a loophole, not just 'more formally.'

As opposed to "evil", which is extremely subjective already?

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

#329

Post by Silhouette »

moduspol wrote: post #124
Silhouette wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just "communicating better" is not a reasonable response to making such a dramatic change in how much money you charge someone. If I tell you I'm going to punch you in the face, that doesn't make the punch acceptable behaviour. Cloud services that pull this kind of bait and switch deserve to be ridiculed and lose lots of business over the negative PR. Cloud services that unintentionally pull this kind of bait and swi…

I didn't say it's acceptable. I said it's not likely to be a vendor lock-in strategy, which is counter to the parent comment's claim.

From the GGP and some of your other comments here, it seems like you are arguing that communication is the main problem here rather than the change itself. Sorry if that was a misunderstanding.

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

#330

Post by talklittle »

degenerate wrote: post #233
jamesk_au wrote: post #167

Possibly relevant (from the Firebase FAQ[1]): Why was my Realtime Database reported bandwidth lower than average between September 2016 and March 2017? For our bandwidth calculations, we normally include SSL encryption overhead (based on layer 5 of the OSI model). However, in September 2016, we introduced a bug that caused our bandwidth reporting to ignore encryption overhead. This might have resulted in artificially…

> we introduced a bug I know it's not the case, but this wording makes it sound intentional. May as well say "We designed an internal problem"

Not really. "Introduced a bug" is fairly common (just do a Google search and see), and clearly does not suggest intention.
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