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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

#451

Post by manigandham »

draw_down wrote: post #346
manigandham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Amazon guys will leave money on the table What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit, there's lot of thought that goes into their pricing and you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money.

Boy, how do you look like a company like Amazon and conclude they're not interested in minimizing profit. That is exactly what they do.

Bezos is worth 80B. Amazon is a global empire operating in practically owns the ecommerce industry and extracts an enormous amount of profit. What exactly are they minimizing?

Charging less to make more is actually maximizing profit for the company.

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

#452

Post by alexbeloi »

mwexler wrote: post #153
snomad wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is it because so many of Google's customers would then feel obligated to also offer support or service? While it's easy to pike at Google as a huge company which should provide this level of service, where do you draw the line? As I look across the collection of services I pay for, I don't see many of them with much more than "contact us" forms on sites, and in-app, no way to contact them at all. Is there a certain s…

>Is there a certain size of vendor or price point where we expect to have human support and an SLA for response?

Yes, when they control the switch that can kill your business.

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

#453

Post by mirimir »

nulagrithom wrote: post #415
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…

I don't understand. > The Firebase Realtime Database charges for SSL overhead on all requests ... We’ve always had a policy of charging this way. So it's always been charged. > Unfortunately, we introduced a bug late last year that began undercharging for SSL Except it hasn't always been charged? > We recently started actually enforcing overages on legacy plans and our current fixed-price ($25/mo Flame) plan. In fact…

My interpretation: 1) they always charged for SSL overhead; 2) they introduced a bug in late 2016 that underestimated SSL overhead; 3) that reduced charges for SSL overhead, and also broke flagging of Spark and Flame plans with too much SSL overhead; 4) they just fixed the bug, restoring normal estimates of SSL overhead; and 5) that restored accurate charges for SSL overhead, and also restored flagging of Spark and Flame plans with too much SSL overhead.

I'm guessing that OP's SSL overhead spiked after the measurement bug was introduced. Maybe also Firebase wasn't enforcing their limits before introducing the measurement bug, because they weren't confident about the data.

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

#454

Post by logicallee »

mgkimsal wrote: post #160
logicallee wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a typo here? 18ms seems like soemthing that could be designed into their whole infrastructure for some reason you don't know about (such as partitioning of networks, whatever) -- after all, it's a cloud solution, right? Maybe 18 ms tacked onto every request is fine for them. To be honest, if all of my Internet requests were 18 ms slower I wouldn't even notice. if I read you correctly and it wasn't a typo, co…

Because we had a shitty codebase that made 350 SQL calls on one page (the user dashboard), so the primary page that everyone used went from 8 seconds, and the end client who had to test and accept this change didn't like it. It became unusable. To (re?)clarify - this was 18ms per query to the SQL cloud (from a google compute engine). Yes, were there things that could be done to reduce that? Of course. The other guy o…

Thanks for that pretty detailed write-up.

I hope you don't think I'm blaming your code base, but just out of pure curiosity, as an amateur question could you mention why the SQL calls couldn't be done in parallel -- did each one depend on the next or something?

At the high level I get everything you just said, just curious about this point, if you remember.

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

#455

Post by ewjordan »

ccorda wrote: post #441
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The $1/gb includes all queries, something that you'd get charged for with say DynamoDB for both read/write queries and for reserving capacity. That said I would be curious why storage is so expensive compared to DynamoDB ($5/gb/mo storage vs. $0.25/gb/mo).

It's at least potentially valid to suggest that charging the same rate for SSL overhead as for normal traffic is maybe not the best system, though, since I'm assuming that the overhead does not affect load on the value-adding servers but rather at a much more straightforward piece of the networking stack (LB or wherever SSL terminates before data gets into the proper Firebase stack).

Say, the $0.12/GB that Google Cloud Functions uses, since there's no value to the user or cost to the provider beyond what you'd see there (and indeed, one solution seems to be to simply route through cloud functions).

Is that possible, mayop100, or am I misunderstanding the system? Obviously it's not up to your users to dictate your pricing, of course, but if it's feasible it would probably earn a lot of goodwill.

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

#456

Post by comex »

sync wrote: post #353
Moru wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden we have at least one bank that has e-cards where you can set up a new card for each transaction. You decide how long it is valid in months and for how much total and recieve a unique card number and ccv. I have been using this at least 15 years for payments online. You set it up, make the payment and then immediately close the card again if you want to be extra safe.

Final is doing a take on this as well for the US: https://getfinal.com/

There's also Privacy:

https://privacy.com

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

#457

Post by hellofunk »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #247
sethrin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some criterion by which GoDaddy is not the worst service provider? Given their popularity with domain parkers and other less savory parts of the IT world, I would assume that the blame was entirely on their shoulders. That said, configuring an email server correctly seems to be rather an involved process[0] so we should perhaps not rule out some measure of incompetence as well as shadiness. [0] https://serve…

The reason we're all here, support. One of the reasons GoDaddy is a company I still use and have used for years is that they have 24/7 telephone support that's reasonably decent. I have called and gotten domain issues sorted by GoDaddy at 2 AM on a Sunday by a dude who didn't have a foreign accent. I'm not a big account with them, surely trivial compared to those mass domain parkers you mention, but they've never mad…

I've had the complete opposite experience with GoDaddy support. Many of them are not so knowledgable and can easily waste time, and billing matters in particular can be quite disorganized with them if something goes wrong. I moved all my domains way from GoDaddy.

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

#458

Post by wolco »

tschellenbach wrote: post #321
sergior wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that machine could serve all the traffic they need and also pay full time dev op guy if needed still for fraction of the cost of the cloud

Seems hard at $25 a month :)

That's worth: 5 micro instances on digitalocean or linode. There are many things we could setup with that much power/flexiblity

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

#459

Post by FireBeyond »

muraiki wrote: post #274
delhanty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for sharing this. I had recently set up an account with FastMail, but now that it's clear that they won't abide by their own promises, I'll look elsewhere.

Yeah, don't be so fast. I've had a legacy Enhanced account which they show no signs of removing - I went to renew it today and could (though I went to the Standard).

I've had nothing but excellent, and personal, service from them, for years. Very high availability, no canned responses.

Even when bitching about Google's support of "this address used to be with Gmail but is now external, but we'll make it problematic for other users to send it calendar invites", though in no way did I imply Fastmail was at fault, they jumped into the HN thread to say "Hey, let us know if we can be of assistance figuring out the issue".

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

#460

Post by aeorgnoieang »

pg_bot wrote: post #178

Evaluation of technologies is an important skill for any developer to learn. Lock-in on a proprietary technology that powers your company should be a giant red flag. In some cases, you are obligated to use a third party (Payment Processing) but if it is a core part of your business you should really think about why you are unable to do it yourself. I've seen a few demos of firebase before and while their demos are hi…

> In some cases, you are obligated to use a third party (Payment Processing) but if it is a core part of your business you should really think about why you are unable to do it yourself.

I'd think getting paid is a core part of every business! Tho I'll admit basically no one can do it themselves.

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