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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

#381

Post by blibble »

immibis wrote: post #298
DontBreakAlex wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.

Well, they have to pay for the amortized equipment cost. Which, yes, is much less than you think. The big 3 clouds have set their prices in an age when services were much more expensive to provide, and they make a big deal out of the fact they've never raised their prices - but they rarely lower them, either. Now they have insane profit margins. The invisible hand of the free market has come to fix that, *but you hav…

> Now they have insane profit margins.

"your margin is my opportunity"

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

#382

Post by jskherman »

gmihelac wrote: post #375

This is going to be a dumb question. I am new to coding ( 3 months in ). I am building a simple static personal website with GitHub pages. I am worried since I had to input billing data to GitHub for my global campus application since I am a student. Is this something I need to worry about? Does cloudflare provide a service that is cheap that can prevent something like this for my GitHub pages site?

Getting DDoSed is rare but highly destructive when it does happen if you happen to use something like Netlify. GitHub Pages is under fair use and only for personal projects (no commercial uses). For commercial use, something like Cloudflare Pages would be better. Cloudflare can also help with their whole suite of tools with mitigating attacks and they will call you if you do exceed the free tier according to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520894.

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

#383

Post by brnt »

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.

I understand that you need to pay bills, but auto-billing over the bandwidth budget just isn't OK, or at least not unless the user specifically configures that that's OK. I for sure didn't understand your bandwidth tiers that way.

You can avoid this sort of bad press and disgruntled users and your support cost by just giving users the option to shut down the site once the bandwidth budget is up.

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

#384

Post by d1sxeyes »

I had a couple of orphaned static sites on Netlify. Just deleted them, and won't put anything else on there now.

Now I get that this is their 'product'—selling hosting to high traffic customers, and I don't particularly begrudge them charging whatever margins they think are suitable for their product and let people make their decision.

But no mechanism to cap maximum spend is completely ridiculous. Even if you require a minimum cap of say $5/$10 dollars, as long as it's clear and transparent, I think that would be reasonable.

Anyway, this has scared me into never trusting Netlify with anything any more.

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

#385

Post by rnts08 »

danogentili wrote: post #221
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.

I believe it's quite the opposite, cloud has normalized absurdly high traffic fees, and that is what should be raising alarm bells.

Yes, cloud services have inflated both bandwidth and amortized hardware costs to absurd levels. You pay for not having to know what to do in order to run something online. Until it breaks.

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

#386

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

That doesn't square with the 5% fee on the original $104k that your company told the OP to then pay.

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

#387

Post by littlestymaar »

tsimionescu wrote: post #183
littlestymaar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.

Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.

But that's not what's happening: they aren't keeping a full host for you.

Your argument is like saying that a bus traveler costs the gas needed to power the bus, but it's never the case: the bus would be cruising no matter what. And symmetrically the VM host would be up no matter what you did with your instance.

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

#388

Post by shit_game »

fabian2k wrote: post #356
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.

You can't rely on such a policy if it is not part of the actual contract. This doesn't address the enormous uncertainty and risk that is present here when using Netlify.

This is what sticks out to me about the situation. I would much rather a site go offline due to service overage triggering at some limit that I set - simply relying on the good faith of a host to subjectively waive fees is not reliable nor does it instill confidence that I won't be financially ruined by malicious third parties (like nearly happened here). I would imagine that the good faith of Netlify in this case would mean very little to a court when there is a contract that stipulates costs for services, and the worst case scenario for a user is that Netlify could take the issue to court with the contract the user agreed to and demand full payment. Even the possibility for this situation to occur without any tools existing to prevent it is terrifying and is a terrible value proposition for a service.

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

#389

Post by gaza3g »

aurareturn wrote: post #331
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.

There are only two questions everyone have: 1. Would Netlify forgive the bill if this didn't go viral? 2. How do you plan to address this issue so that it never happens again? Everyone here knew someone from Netlify would come and say OP wouldn't have to pay. That was a given. Now we want to know the important answers.

Thank God for social media that the user was able to get attention about this on Reddit which he was then advised there to post this on HN. It must have been stressful to see a six-figure bill and then get told that that, no worries, you’d ‘only’ be charged $5k instead for a static site. It’s just ridiculous to me to be sent a 6-figure bill in the first place.

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

#390

Post by erremerre »

valine wrote: post #349
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.

I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

Same boat here.

the fact that once it arrives to the limits does not display an error page.

At this point I honestly do not care about they changing their policy, they should have thought that a normal person receiving a 100000$ bill on a free tier shall not been at all on the table in any circumstance, even if they forgive the bill, nobody needs to stress out like that.

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