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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

#401

Post by herbst »

gaza3g wrote: post #389
aurareturn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope this is not one of the cases that get simply forgotten and in a week or two their beginner unfriendly platform gets recommended again without a second thought.

With models like this and AWS people will get afraid of success

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

#402

Post by doque »

TheDataMaverick wrote: post #400
doque wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks @doque !! Even though I've been actively looking for this, I couldn't find it. However, this solution ONLY provides notifications; it doesn't address the underlying problem. I could be sick for five days and not check my phone. What I need—and, in my experience, what all larger companies require—is a method to halt consumption entirely, similar to Snowflake."

That method you're mentioning is provided by setting up a webhook that pauses a project, which can be fully automated.

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

#403

Post by mrtksn »

notpushkin wrote: post #379
mrtksn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost It's a value added service, they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity. Therefore unfair characterisation. Plus, if you dive deeper: Bandwidth doesn't cost anything because bandwidth is just about pulsing some light in some glass fiber and applying some minuscule voltage on some metal fiber.Okay, maybe it costs some amount of electricity but all this is…

> they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity I really don't get your point. If you're a hosting provider, the very thing you're selling is bandwidth (and disk space). Everything else is a value added service.

I disagree, they are not a colocation service that happens to rent servers. They are opinionated platform for deploying web applications in a specific way. The bandwidth happens to be a necessity to do that and also a useful metric for billing by usage.

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

#404

Post by blibble »

gregorvand wrote: post #99

There's a reason price plans are 'pay as you go' - so that they don't take on any risk for things like this. Moral of the story: never go for pay as you go by usage plans if this scenario is not mitigated through a third party. By no means am I trying to suggest a get out for Netlify here - more a rule of thumb for anyone worried the same could happen to them.

they are taking a risk because they haven't credit checked the user

most people wouldn't be able to pay a $100k bill

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

#405

Post by TheDataMaverick »

doque wrote: post #402
TheDataMaverick wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks @doque !! Even though I've been actively looking for this, I couldn't find it. However, this solution ONLY provides notifications; it doesn't address the underlying problem. I could be sick for five days and not check my phone. What I need—and, in my experience, what all larger companies require—is a method to halt consumption entirely, similar to Snowflake."

That method you're mentioning is provided by setting up a webhook that pauses a project, which can be fully automated.

Thanks again @doque

For me it seems a little overkill to build an automated system that can handle webhook that can pauses a project

Hmm .. to maybe I'm overthinking it .. could you describe the architecture needed to setup a system like this?

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

#406

Post by bluerooibos »

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 assume you'll be offering this user a good amount of credit on their account for having to deal with this BS and the stress of being told they owe you $100k?

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

#407

Post by neurostimulant »

whatshisface wrote: post #254
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.

Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?

In EU, yes. EU cloud providers offers bandwidth on the cheap, much cheaper than anywhere else.

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

#408

Post by jeroenhd »

signaru wrote: post #297
jeroenhd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like these give out ridiculously huge free tiers in the hopes that very few users end up using the high free bandwidth limits. In most cases, they do. However, they do need to make their money back somehow. I don't really get why people put their tiny static sites on hosts designed to never fall over no matter the traffic generated, no matter the situation. You're running a blog, not a government service. Y…

Any suggestions for hosts that will just make your site offline once it reaches its tier limit? Cloudflare and Netlify get suggested a lot and I was considering one of them before this.

From what I can tell, OVH allows for unlimited traffic, unless you host in Sydney or Singapore.

Budget hosters will either cut you off completely (shut down your VPS) or throttle your network. For instance, Contabo doesn't charge extra, but it does reduce your network speed to 100mbps if you're exceeding an average connection speed of 100mbps over a timespan of 10 days. Leaseweb offers you the choice to power down a VPS when exceeding the bandwidth cap (though this is disabled by default).

If you need more bandwidth, Hetzner is popular, and charges around €1 per TB of bandwidth if you exceed their free bandwidth (+VAT, the $104k bill would be €40 under Hetzner, as 20TB is included for free) and provides configurable automated traffic email notifications before you hit that. Personally, I would add a warning after the very first terabyte, because I don't know what personal project even uses that much bandwidth.

Their dedicated servers don't seem to have a bandwidth limit, though there seems to be a fair use policy (there's this thread: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/180504/hetzner-traffic-use... where a user complains about Hetzner threatening to end the contract after exceeding 250TB of traffic).

Many VPS providers and shared hosters won't send you these huge bills, but you should always read up on their policies when renting servers of any kind. These hosters don't come with free tiers (which I assume is the reason people consider services like Netlify in the first place) but they will usually tell you how they deal with bandwidth issues in their FAQs.

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

#409

Post by [deleted] »

bluerooibos wrote: post #406
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 assume you'll be offering this user a good amount of credit on their account for having to deal with this BS and the stress of being told they owe you $100k?

[deleted]

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

#410

Post by Hamuko »

bobfunk wrote: post #351
aurareturn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral 2. While I've always favored erring towards keeping people's sites up we are currently working on changing the default behavior to never let free sites incur overages

If forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, how come this was the customer support's first reaction:

>We normally discount these kinds of attacks to about 20% of the cost, which would make your new bill $20,900. I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225.

20% and 5% are quite a bit higher than forgiven.

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