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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

#381

Post by mayop100 »

funkyy wrote: post #374
mayop100 wrote: post #366

[Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue. There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help ot…

What about thousands of users that will not see this reply? The gymnastics that an average user needs to do in order to contact support are ridiculous, and according to many stories here, it mostly solves nothing. Your explanation is fair enough, but I assume you guys should make a solid plan for increasing support quality and make it more available. As of wrongly billed resources - to be honest, you are half blamed…

All fair points and things we're working on.

We do often give credits to help in situations like this, though I can't speak to specifics publicly. We're working with this developer to try to resolve the issue, and we'll do so with other users who run into similar problems. This user did contact support, but we dropped the ball here. We'll be reviewing our support to find other devs we might have missed.

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

#382

Post by murukesh_s »

mayop100 wrote: post #366

[Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue. There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help ot…

Andrew, Firebase is great, you did a great job and looks like you are continuing to do so by engaging directly like now. Having said that, it's time you, your team or even the entire google start looking seriously at automating your support workflow. How on earth can such a popular product ignore support requests, whether it's via email or any other medium?, especially for paying users. You should have a CRM/CSM tool that should automatically assign tickets based on the email received and if not resolved within a time period should escalate directly to senior person(s) until it's acted upon.

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

#383

Post by vxNsr »

_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.

I know that bank of america offers this feature on all its personal credit cards. You can create a temporary card number (and related info) as well as how much can be charged in a given month and how many months the card number should be active for.

The only reason I don't use them for everything is because I get better cashback/points with other cards.

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

#384

Post by mayop100 »

murukesh_s wrote: post #382
mayop100 wrote: post #366

[Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue. There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help ot…

Andrew, Firebase is great, you did a great job and looks like you are continuing to do so by engaging directly like now. Having said that, it's time you, your team or even the entire google start looking seriously at automating your support workflow. How on earth can such a popular product ignore support requests, whether it's via email or any other medium?, especially for paying users. You should have a CRM/CSM tool…

Clearly we have some work to do here!

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

#385

Post by matrix »

rhodysurf wrote: post #283
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…

For Google Cloud can't you set a billing limit for it to not exceed? That's what I have done but I have not come close to exceeeding it yet so IDK if there is something I am missing.

I think these billing limits only apply to AppEngine services.

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

#386

Post by delhanty »

pranavsinghca wrote: post #364
delhanty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think this should have ever been offered. Curious - how could FastMail ever properly close/sunset these accounts? Were they going to regularly check on all of their customers to see if they had passed away? Was there some 'we close the email if you don't log in for 5 years straight'? Serious question - how should these type of lifetime promises ever be properly managed? (especially when the customer is an ind…

From a business point of view, they are generally regarded to be a bad idea. See various comments on what is now the main FastMail thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14357859

My point is simply this:

FastMail unwisely offered lifetime email service for one-time $15 payment. I accepted that offer on behalf of my father.

FastMail should now honour that agreement.

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

#387

Post by ensignavenger »

specialp wrote: post #214
taneq wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have been told that that law only applies to consumer accounts, not business accounts.

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

#388

Post by theptip »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #365
brianwawok wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I like the fact I can pay one price for self support and another for 15 minute resolution. Why force people to pay for support if they don't need it?

I think there's a major difference between say, support figuring out how to implement their product, which is a you problem, their service is working fine. And a wholly different one if they screw up and you can't talk to them about it without paying them. The former is an incentive to self-serve and investigate yourself, the latter is an incentive for the company to provide shoddy service to people pay to resolve it…

Tiered support contracts are common in enterprise software. If the base level of service were bad, nobody would use the software, and that's clearly not the case here.

(More common is the Oracle/IBM-style approach of making your docs vague enough that you need professional services to actually integrate the product).

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

#389

Post by weka »

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.

Yep. Completely turned off from pricing to database "storage" to everything in between. Completely taking it off for my React project which I will transition to deepstream -- maybe.

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

#390

Post by tehwebguy »

mayop100 wrote: post #381
funkyy wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about thousands of users that will not see this reply? The gymnastics that an average user needs to do in order to contact support are ridiculous, and according to many stories here, it mostly solves nothing. Your explanation is fair enough, but I assume you guys should make a solid plan for increasing support quality and make it more available. As of wrongly billed resources - to be honest, you are half blamed…

All fair points and things we're working on. We do often give credits to help in situations like this, though I can't speak to specifics publicly. We're working with this developer to try to resolve the issue, and we'll do so with other users who run into similar problems. This user did contact support, but we dropped the ball here. We'll be reviewing our support to find other devs we might have missed.

Your responses are encouraging. Hopefully the customer service example you set today will be followed by the rest of Google!
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