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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

#431
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

it's 100% not sustainable. Use it while it's good, but don't get vendor locked in, because sooner or later they will increase the prices

They've been going for at least 10 years...

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

#432

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

> 1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral

No offence, but this sounds like "trust me bro" billing and it is not good enough. Someone could literally get a heart attack from getting $100,000 bill - this amount of debt can literally ruin someone financially.

> 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

I hope you understand that chance someone who used to pay you $20 / month unlikely want to ever get $10,000 bill. Yeah people might dislike that their website went down due high traffic, but it's not gonna bring this much negative PR as incidents like this. There should be some sanity check at least.

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

#433

Pulling my netlify hosted stuff today. F that. Sorry to hnbadges users!

Me too, it took like 30 mins to create cloudflare account and move my small static sites.

Lol I just deleted the account (surprisingly easy). Since I didn’t have a custom domain, just let it die for now.

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

#434
post #46

More reasons why I avoid clouds with outrageous bandwidth fees, and prefer Hetzner's low cost fixed pricing with Cloudflare R2's 0 egress fees. Even if the DDoS wasn't caught by Cloudflare, the total cost for 192TB bandwidth on Hetzner would be €172. Although even after 10 years on Hetzner I've never paid for any bandwidth, always well within their generous 20TB free bandwidth.

Hetzner will just null route your server if you’re DDoS’d.

Which is vastly preferable to a thousand dollar bill (not to mention a hundred thousand dollar bill) for most websites.

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

#436
post #74

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere. Just went through Vercel's docs: --- "Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically miti…

“We leave your safe deposit box unlocked. You might want to forge your own lock and key. If we happen to notice someone stealing out of your box, we will let them grab as much as they can for one minute, then maybe install our own lock if our revenue is close to target.”

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

#437
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly the only reason I can even come up with that Netlify wouldn't have such controls in place is exactly if they do _not_ simply forgive these sorts of jumps in costs (as the CEO here seems to be claiming). I'm pretty sure if they'd be left holding the bag, they'd manage to find some way to cut off these kinds of jumps in usage.

Maybe it’s a tax dodge! “Forgive” 100k of “overages” which cost Netlify next to nothing, then report it as a write off on taxes.

I doubt IRS would buy that BS.

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

#438
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A debt is still a debt even charged back. There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.

Yes if a corporation says I owe them $100k I will lose sleep. Even if they don’t have my card details.

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

#439

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 guys see a lot of traffic. Why not offer DDoS protection for the free tier by default?

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

#440
post #401
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think fly/netlify/vercel/render etc. get a decent enough flak on here for costs and/or reliability.

The average HNer seems to be recommending colocating your physical server :-)

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