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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

#411

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

pushedx wrote: post #238
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #119

This happened to me on a much smaller scale about a year back. I was never happier to have stuck to my guns, building my whole site with a single `hugo` command - it made it very easy to migrate off that platform for good. If anyone has a solid bash one liner to stress test a website, so that I can test whether my cloud billing cap will work correctly if I accidentally try to egress 100 MB of data or something, I wou…

apachebench (cli command ab), is an Apache licensed stress testing utility, not much relation to the web server, which can be easily used to stress test a webserver. the binary should be easy to install with your package manager, you may have it installed already example: ab http://something.com

Yes! That's the one, thank you.

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

#414

Post by jeroenhd »

jskherman wrote: post #394
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…

Regardless, at the end of the day, budgets still need to be followed whether you're an individual or a business. It's simply insane in the first place that someone on the free tier would want absolutely no downtime regardless of how high the traffic is. For that, it would make sense for such an individual to be already on an Enterprise plan if they do expect it to likely happen and for which many do not.

I think it depends on what you're using the free plan for. If you're kickstarting a business and manage to attract a wide audience by getting featured on HN/Reddit/the news, you may want to sacrifice a few thousand dollars for the user growth that all of this traffic provided. Paying enterprise pricing doesn't necessarily make sense if you're normally getting less than a few thousand visits per day. Same goes for all the hip and cool server solutions such as "serverless" cloud functions.

The core product is already enterprise-grade. Netlify's pricing page basically turns into a "contact sales" button when you select "enterprise", probably for businesses that did their math and are trying to get a discount. Everything about their website seems to target medium to large businesses or hopeful startups.

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

#415

Post by hnfong »

7moritz7 wrote: post #377
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.

How does a 60 TB in a day peak for a site that previously never crossed the free tier threshhold not qualify as "attack pattern"? This is a static site. To reach that sort of bandwidth out of nowhere you'd need to publish the blueprint for a teleportation machine

To be fair, these days, things can become viral literally overnight.

That said, instead of depending on unreliable heuristics, they should just allow an option to change the behavior. The "current policy" to charge small sites on the free tier thousands of dollars instead of just throttling/shutting down the traffic is really predatory.

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

#417

Post by iforgotpassword »

twixfel wrote: post #336
iforgotpassword wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

People don't check for every possible thing that can go wrong, otherwise we wouldn't have time to do anything. I remember when I got charged a "cancelling fee" for cancelling my Adobe subscription that accidentally went past its free trial. The situation was so ludicrous that I had never imagined that they would charge something like 6 months worth of subs me to cancel a monthly subscription. In the end I got out of…

Sorry, maybe this is a generational thing? I always look for a catch when something is "free". Your example as old as time, offer a free trial period but if you don't cancel X days before it ends, you automatically subscribe for another week/month/year. This has extended to getting a big discount for your first year after signup and then you pretty much have to cancel and go to a competitor, or wait until a couple days before the contract ends and some sales rep will call you and offer you another discount. It's scummy, it sucks, but it's been s reality for decades and is only getting worse.

With hosting - be it cloud or virtual or real hardware - the problem has always been that bandwidth use is completely outside your control. It was the first thing to check in the early 2000s and still is today, to an even greater extend.

So yes, sorry, as the other reply says, I might come across uncharitable or even condescending, but as tech people developing tech stuff how can one not be at least a little careful when there's a big "free candy" sign slapped onto something?

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

#418

Post by raiyu »

noir_lord wrote: post #378
bobfunk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in. i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline". Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you. This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly,…

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down.

What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. And typically speaking a $104k bill would be hard to get paid up regardless if the customer's typical transaction balance was $5/mo and their credit card limit wouldn't be that high.

Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant.

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

#419

Post by meh___ »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #360
bobfunk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral This isn't what you said in your first post, you said: > 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. So forgiving "lots and lots" doesn't move the needle. Do you or do you not forgi…

I don't think this will get answered, unfortunately.

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

#420

Post by boesboes »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #276
dhaavi wrote: post #7

> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.

Some quick back of napkin math says 190TB would cost about $12k in AWS cloudfront costs.

FYI: From my experience, if you do more the 20-25TB, you can get 75% off no questions asked.
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