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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

#431

Post by theptip »

snomad wrote: post #140
flipp3r wrote: post #14

Reminds me of getting Bait-and-Switch'd by Google App Engine in 2011. From 10's of euros to 1000's. > They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options. Sounds like Google did a great job with Firebase. Definitely gives you that Google-feel of unresponsi…

> They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options. I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human custome…

GCP sells support as a separate product. If you're a hobbyist, then that's great, as you can keep your costs lower.

If you're a business, there's no excuse not to pay Google for support. It's $150/mo; significantly higher than the $25/mo infrastructure bill the OP was discussing, but not unreasonable if you want to have a chance of guaranteeing QoS to your customers.

https://cloud.google.com/support/#comparison

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

#432

Post by manigandham »

83457 wrote: post #90
manigandham wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What trust does that earn exactly? It's a strategy, not some noble cause.

Trust that you won't be ~extorted~ bait and switched in the future?

How so? Because they haven't done it yet? Where does this extra trust come from?

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

#433

Post by alasdair_ »

Veratyr wrote: post #417
omgwhat wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What support? Google has no support, ever. You care about "users" but don't give a shit about any one user. I'm starting to really fucking hate Google.

Google doesn't have support for free products but they certainly do for paid. Whether the support is good or not is another question but it's there. Just go to https://support.google.com/googleplay/?hl=en and click "Contact Us" in the top right. All the menu items I clicked that don't have straightforward solutions went straight to a menu where within 2-3 minutes I can get live chat or a phone call. I've also had no…

We pay $150 a month for google's "silver" level support for GCE, appengine etc.

It's consistently very good - they helped us with code debugging, performance optimization, load balancing and other fairly complex issues that typically need an experienced engineer.

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

#434

Post by stephenr »

geekme wrote: post #408
mayop100 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly we have some work to do here!

This has been the case with every google product

I think you meant Google project.

Googles real products are made out of meat [1]

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

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

#435

Post by alasdair_ »

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.

You can. Beware though! It can take 24 hours to increase the limit - horrible if you get a sudden spike in traffic from, say, a techcrunch post or something.

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

#436

Post by dozzie »

mseebach wrote: post #174
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…

Of course, this approach only works if you're happy to have your service cut off more or less abruptly if your card bounces, something the author of the article explicitly mentions isn't an option. The problem (in the article at least) isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.

> The problem [...] isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.

Sorry, but this is the risk of using somebody else's service -- especially Google's -- as a critical component of a business. It may be marvellous for developers not to bother with infrastructure for their own service, but this strategy likes to come back and bite in the ass.

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

#437

Post by utternerd »

omgwhat wrote: post #401
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 support? Google has no support, ever. You care about "users" but don't give a shit about any one user. I'm starting to really fucking hate Google.

Google's customer support for Project Fi has been absolutely fantastic from my perspective, and is very flexible.

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

#438

Post by CodeWriter23 »

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…

It's great that you're going to help the one guy who amassed a bully pulpit here on HN.

I have a question though...Why does Firebase charge ONE DOLLAR per gigabyte? 1995 called and wants their business model back.

This alone has limited my use of Firebase to Dynamic Linking for my app. Not that my app is going to smash any records, but paying customers are a good thing to get, aren't they?

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

#439

Post by Moru »

funkyy wrote: post #425
Veratyr wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't have support for free products but they certainly do for paid. Whether the support is good or not is another question but it's there. Just go to https://support.google.com/googleplay/?hl=en and click "Contact Us" in the top right. All the menu items I clicked that don't have straightforward solutions went straight to a menu where within 2-3 minutes I can get live chat or a phone call. I've also had no…

They do have support. I was stuck once with a friendly fella, that spent 45+ minutes talking about weather and weekend adventures to me, rather than solving my issue. It took less than 5 minutes to solve the issue, almost an hour of talk time. I would even bet money that the guy was heavily stoned. At the end he asked me to provide positive feedback to him in exchange for friendly service. He said he will redirect me…

This is what happens when you try to drive work-morale with a stick and carrot approach. Teach your workers good morale and lead with good example, every customer is important. But also your employees.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

delhanty wrote: post #164
shaqbert wrote: post #7

Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve a…

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…

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