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Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

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Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#361

Post by ignoramous »

EE84M3i wrote: post #306
cube2222 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare pricing is indeed positively ridiculous. At OpenTofu[0] we’re using CloudFlare R2 to host the providers and modules registry[1]. Bandwidth is free, you only pay for requests. This already would be great, but there’s more - you only pay for requests that actually hit R2. So with an almost 100% cache hit ratio, we barely register any billable requests. Recently someone decided to load test us and generated ~…

Is this in line with the TOS? I thought there were restrictions on serving non-website content in the free tier, or does that not apply to the CDN if you're using R2 as an origin?

> R2 as an origin

We front our distribution service with Cloudflare Workers fronting R2 fronting S3 / Lightsail Object Store (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-r2-super-slurper/). That brought our costs down from $500 to $2 serving the same amount of traffic.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#362

Post by fullstackchris »

I'm a huge Netlify fan, but stories like these are scary. Just spent the last hour building a custom serverless function that sends email / SMS at various bandwidth usages - potentially could be improved with an auto shutdown of the offending site beyond 75 GB:

https://gist.github.com/princefishthrower/4517ff44a9f4c5b2d2...

For now it's still a workaround... looks like I'll be migrating to Hetzner soon...

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#363

Post by CogitoCogito »

swyx wrote: post #340
croemer wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long has this been the "current" policy? 2 hours?

ex employee here, left 4 years ago. was policy back then too.

So the original support worker just pulled 20% (and then 5%) out of thin air? Given your internal knowledge, can you maybe explain why a support worker would ever do that if policy is simply to forgive the debt?

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#364

Post by canucker2016 »

Netlify's 2017 blog post says you don't need Cloudflare.

from https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/28/why-you-dont-need-cl...

"...Top to bottom, our infrastructure redundancies make sure we keep traffic flowing, so there's no need to add more redundancy with Cloudflare. ...

You don't need Cloudflare when you use Netlify

As you can see, we already offer what Cloudflare does, and more. If your site is not on Netlify, perhaps consider us for your one stop solution for hosting, SSL, DDoS protection, DNS load balancing, and continuous deployments. ..."

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#365

Post by ignoramous »

ilogik wrote: post #219
pacifika wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

it's 100% not sustainable. Use it while it's good, but don't get vendor locked in, because sooner or later they will increase the prices

> it's 100% not sustainable

As a business for Cloudflare?

  Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible [2] (which apparently means $0 for unlimited bandwidth [3]). And where they can't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for free.

  This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for Prime customers despite it being one of the biggest loss makers to their retail business. Prime basically has since forced Amazon to bring down costs through building expensive and vast distribution & logistics network that spawns the globe. Doing so was a considerable drain on the resources in the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable moat around its largest business.

  Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton Christensen would be proud of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337183

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#366

Post by doque »

TheDataMaverick wrote: post #191

I deleted all my Vercel project, moved to Cloudflare, send this support message to Vercel: Vercel seems like the perfect solution, and I love how it supports the development community. I am moving all my current and future hobby projects away from Vercel due to concerns raised in this discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776 Although I am a very small customer of Vercel, I have been advising larger o…

Vercel has had spend management for a while now: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-spend-management-realtim...

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#367

Post by d1sxeyes »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #61
rafram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netli…

Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv

Nowadays for customers spending millions of dollars you'd expect (at least, Amazon would expect) that the customer has a FinOps department who are already working on getting the most 'bang for their buck' out of what they're paying for and minimising their spend, and they would jump to another platform in a heartbeat if they thought they could save money. It's not unreasonable to think that you don't need to do these customers any favours to keep their business, because those customers are big enough to look after themselves.

For smaller customers, the friendliness of customer support and the flexibility to help them if they make mistakes is much more likely to be a retention consideration. And who knows when a company spending 3 digits a month becomes a customer spending 6 digits a month? You want to be the provider of choice in case the company grows.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#368

Post by syrgian »

DANmode wrote: post #89
serial_dev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that they will charge you 20k (a year's rent for me, no biggie) instead of 100k for your free website, or 5k if you got lucky.

If you value uptime, even through being massively attacked, they can offer you that.

I had the intuition that Netlify are extremely incompetent compared to Cloudflare, and this thread adds another data point. So no, if you value uptime you are not going to rely on them.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#369

Post by CogitoCogito »

tledakis wrote: post #337
bobfunk wrote: post #317

Netlify CEO here. Our support team has reached out to the user from the thread to let them know they're not getting charged for this. It's currently our policy to not shut down free sites during traffic spikes that doesn't match attack patterns, but instead forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes after the fact. Apologies that this didn't come through in the initial support reply.

> It's currently our policy to not shut down free sites during traffic spikes that doesn't match attack patterns, but instead forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes after the fact. Well, giving the option to users to plan ahead would be best, no? Like a setting to choose whether they want a potentially unlimited bill versus downtime. Instead of that, you are choosing to stress and make people scared/anxious/hom…

Frankly the only reason I can even come up with that Netlify wouldn't have such controls in place is exactly if they do _not_ simply forgive these sorts of jumps in costs (as the CEO here seems to be claiming). I'm pretty sure if they'd be left holding the bag, they'd manage to find some way to cut off these kinds of jumps in usage.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#370

Post by tsp »

I have been using Netlify for years, for my own projects, but also recommended it to all my freelance clients to host the projects that I was building for them. Going forward I will move all my static pages to other hosting providers.

The Netlify team must think: we waive the fees, because in this instance we noticed the negative press and want to avoid this from blowing up. When this happens to other users, we don’t care, as long as it does not go viral.

Such a pity, Netlify has great UX and I was so happy hosting static pages on their service. But without spending limits, this is not an option for me any more. I could not sleep well when there is a possibility of a $10.000 invoice reaching my inbox.

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