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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

#331

Post by mseebach »

corford wrote: post #317
mseebach wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Or perhaps they block or throttle your account. Stopping payment is the nuclear option, you can't expect any cooperation with outstanding payments on your account (not that you necessarily can with a fully paid up account), and your position, if you should choose to pursue legal action, just got a lot more complicated.

To be clear, the only time any of this matters is when a huge, unexpected bill arrives. Day to day, you should anticipate any big, legitimate bills and make sure funds are there to settle them (or you scale back usage to avoid getting smacked). It's when a big bill lands in error or is introduced sneakily that having a separate "cloud only card" can save you. In that case, it's the supplier that's gone nuclear and yo…

Sure, but that's just not what we're discussing here. The author of the original article clearly authorised the increased spend (but obviously not the sudden change causing it), and could have declined (presumably at the cost of having his app throttled or shut down). Nothing about a "cloud only card" would have changed his situation the least.

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

#332

Post by mdavidn »

r3bl wrote: post #318
dkersten wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!

Well, to be perfectly honest, you are paying for Fastmail, while Gmail is free.

Oh, you're paying for Gmail. Just not in upfront dollars like with Fastmail.

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

#333

Post by funkyy »

bolololo1 wrote: post #63
piokoch wrote: post #8

I am so surprised why people buy into some SAAS software that does simple things instead of hiring 2 programmers from cheap location (somewhere between India and Poland western border), getting Hetzner VPS or dedicates server (even the second option is cheap, including a few administrator hours) and be done. It is not so hard to predict failure/buy out of some SAAS provider, it happened so many times. I am curious wh…

Still cheaper for a single dev starting a startup to hook up to Firebase/AWS/Azure than hiring 'cheap' devs from Poland.

tbh, a database, for example, for most startups is not hard on the beginning:

-installing MySQL

-Installing Apache

-installing PHP MyAdmin

-running some commands from shell and SQL

-done.

If you create a startup it is wise to know the basics as such and in case that you grow to hire people to pimp it up.

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

#334

Post by ams6110 »

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 am a long-time Fastmail user who also was on the "lifetime" 16MB plan. Last year I switched because I wanted some features that were only available with a newer plan. I was a little annoyed to have to give up my lifetime plan but in my case it was more understandable.

I've been very happy with Fastmail for over a decade and this seems like one of the few missteps they've made. New "lifetime" 16MB accounts have not been available in years. It really doesn't seem that there could be very many of them still in active use that it would hurt anything to just continue to grandfather them, especially since they were sold explicitly as "lifetime" one-payment accounts.

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

#335

Post by infogulch »

Aissen wrote: post #228
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…

I'm guessing they had to update this FAQ after they started ignoring the OP (and other customers) messages. Also, something is wrong with the timeline with regards to the OP's blogpost where they say they've been using Firebase for a while.

Yeah OP says they've been using FB with similar costs for over two years, so I highly doubt they're complaining about something that was only a problem for the last 6 months.

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

#336

Post by corford »

mseebach wrote: post #331
corford wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, the only time any of this matters is when a huge, unexpected bill arrives. Day to day, you should anticipate any big, legitimate bills and make sure funds are there to settle them (or you scale back usage to avoid getting smacked). It's when a big bill lands in error or is introduced sneakily that having a separate "cloud only card" can save you. In that case, it's the supplier that's gone nuclear and yo…

Sure, but that's just not what we're discussing here. The author of the original article clearly authorised the increased spend (but obviously not the sudden change causing it), and could have declined (presumably at the cost of having his app throttled or shut down). Nothing about a "cloud only card" would have changed his situation the least.

Totally agree. If he/she authorised it after being given an opportunity to decline then, yes, it's absolutely on them. /me clearly didn't read the article ;)

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

#337

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

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.

I don't think you have to be following these updates very closely to notice.... like me.

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

#338

Post by gondo »

Moru wrote: post #301
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…

In Sweden we have at least one bank that has e-cards where you can set up a new card for each transaction. You decide how long it is valid in months and for how much total and recieve a unique card number and ccv. I have been using this at least 15 years for payments online. You set it up, make the payment and then immediately close the card again if you want to be extra safe.

what is the bank name if i may ask?

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

#339

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

stemuk wrote: post #196
redwood wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I'm going to give a shoutout to https://feathersjs.com

I have yet to see a platform that's as flexible and robust, with the added bonus of being real-time.

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