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’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.
Same. Toy project and it’s not worth the risk of using netlify. What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?
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…
> Cloudflare's ddos protection Yeah, we got hammered once with over 10TB/mo and noped out of Netlify as fast as we could: https://twitter.com/rethinkdns/status/1370342245841342466 Had to pay the bill in full. Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0. Makes it hard to move to any other platform. As a small tech shop, this is my Hotel California I'm happy to never leave.
> Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0
It's not really ridiculous if you think about what you're giving them.
You are massively benefiting their platform by providing them data which they use to train their services and then sell those services to other customers.
I'd make a case that the data they collect is the most important part of their business and the free tier is a major component of this.
You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
Yes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).
Is it, though? We've been getting a lot of pushback for months, even for things that weren't really completely our fault (and were made worse by the horrible lag of cost explorer), or even for things that were aws bugs. Maybe now it's official policy, but definitely it's been hard to get refunds for a while now. They were throwing tens of thousands of dollars of credits at us to just play with new services a year and a half ago.
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.
Well, it's still debatable for the history books if social media is a net good.
Before the internet, these issues would be handled by local news journalism, and still sometimes do!
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
Regarding #2: I would rather have my hobbyist website go down rather than facing the daunting task to raise a query on HN and hope the bill goes away.
I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.
Same. I'm looking at alternatives to get off netlify ASAP.
Any cheap VPS and nginx should work for 99% of their customer base I guess. If you want easy deploy for static or dynamic just use git hooks.
A few years ago I taught an introduction to website developmment module at a university where students built jekyll sites. I got them to to host on netlify. Now that I no longer teach at that uni and their email accounts will have expired I'm wondering if there's any way I can contact them to tell them to take their sites off netlify... Disaster if they get hit by charges like this.
At the rate it's going this story will probably reach them without your help.
Not necessarily, the majority of them probably wouldn't have ended up in anything tech related. But they probably did end up back in China, so hopefully it would be hard to demand payment at least?
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.
Lol this deescalated pretty quickly, went from $104K to $20K to $5K to $0
Which basically means you almost scammed the customer for $5K or $20K. Super negative practices. I for one could never trust a company operating in that manner. It would be much more honest to say "unlimited bandwidth" and set a hard-limit for maximum budget, then people know they won't be charged, than to go through all this crap and then pretend you're doing a favor to the customer (you're not). If I'm normally spending $10/month any idiot out there would know for sure that I'm not going to spend $104K instantly. That's a very basic filter to have. But you don't place such filters because obviously you're working on the principle to scam people many thousands of $ if they fall for that. Heck, for all we know you might send that amount of traffic to your customer and the try to scam them and if it doesn't work then pretend you're doing them a favor.
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?
It feels like they are intentionally making it complicated to figure out to avoid people actually setting hard limits. Vercel recently had a customer get charged 20k+ that posted on twitter. When Vercel employees mentioned this way of controlling it through a webhook, most people didn't even know about it. I feel like a hard limitbshould be easy to set in your projects settings and that it should have a default value.
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.
Given this has been asked here multiple times without response from /u/bobfunk, it’s hard to conclude anything except that he is lying.