A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by kuschku » Wed, May 17, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #422

stemuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.

Or it's just engineers that swarm around since that's the demographic here but this needs a response from PR, not from engineering. What do you want google/firebase engineers to say? The engineering response is pretty clear-cut. Polling every minute from an uncached SSL connection is expensive, don't do that. That's pretty obvious and the author admits this was a mistake. The complaint is about everything that's not…

Expensive?

I'm sorry, I can have 50'000 devices poll every minute via an uncached SSL connection on my 16$/month server from Online.net, including bandwidth and traffic costs.

I'm not sure what you're smoking, but I want that, too.

Seriously, at Google, TLS is terminated in hardware, and bandwidth costs less than a cent per terabyte for ISPs or Google.

The costs that this caused are basically nil.

(This, btw, is why I'm using kubernetes on rented bare metal, paying 30$ a month, for what would cost me, including traffic, around 900$ (Google Cloud with rented servers) to 63'000$ (Firebase) a month.)

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

#462

Post by onmobiletemp » Wed, May 17, 2017, 8:06 PM UTC

Firebase never made sense to me. I know nothing about web dev though. It seems like you are handing over your project to some nebulous entity and they can change the deal, stop updating or patching or raise the price. It seems better to simply build the whole project yourself.

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

#463

Post by dbg31415 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 8:17 PM UTC

This is always the concern with services... and why I like containers over building on some platform-as-a-service model.

I want to be able to insulate my projects from risks like this, worst case they jack the prices and I move hosts.

This is also why I think AWS Lambda is cool, but why I'm really hesitant to dive in. I like keeping my options open.

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

#464

Post by mattbillenstein » Wed, May 17, 2017, 8:59 PM UTC

Eh, typical convenience versus control trade-off.

IMHO, the time needed to build and deploy your own thing using open-source and open protocols is well spent when compared to being at the mercy of BigPaasCorp when it comes to stuff like this.

A VM running nginx, an app in your language of choice, and postgres isn't that hard to setup -- and the costs and scaling of such is well understood.

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

#465

Post by kuschku » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:00 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #388

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a major difference between say, support figuring out how to implement their product, which is a you problem, their service is working fine. And a wholly different one if they screw up and you can't talk to them about it without paying them. The former is an incentive to self-serve and investigate yourself, the latter is an incentive for the company to provide shoddy service to people pay to resolve it…

Tiered support contracts are common in enterprise software. If the base level of service were bad, nobody would use the software, and that's clearly not the case here. (More common is the Oracle/IBM-style approach of making your docs vague enough that you need professional services to actually integrate the product).

A free level of support that requires answering within of 14 days to any issues via email, letter, or phone, and providing an address that a letter can be sent to, is required by law in the entire EU for any paid services.

Just FYI.

Google doesn’t even provide that.

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

#466

Post by tajen » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:01 PM UTC

geekme wrote: post #412

tscanausa wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about this. I work for our cloud platform support team ( we don't cover firebsse) and this is not the impression we want our customers to get. We don't want to be calling customers in the middle of their night while they are sleeping. Its not an effective way to resolve issues. We need help identifying when we fall short so we can fix the issues. Ways to let us know: 1) fill out the survey when your cas…

Surprise there is a support team!

I've fallen again in this parallel universe where Google has a support team. How do you go back again? Ah, here it i—click

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

#467

Post by ww520 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:03 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #422

stemuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.

Or it's just engineers that swarm around since that's the demographic here but this needs a response from PR, not from engineering. What do you want google/firebase engineers to say? The engineering response is pretty clear-cut. Polling every minute from an uncached SSL connection is expensive, don't do that. That's pretty obvious and the author admits this was a mistake. The complaint is about everything that's not…

The author admitted it's a mistake to use Firebase from the start.

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

#468

Post by kuschku » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

yunolisten wrote: post #111

stemuk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because most self-hosted services are 10-20x cheaper than comparable SaaS offerings. In the realtime space Firebase is particularly known for being really expensive for the scalable plans (blaze plan).

> No, because most self-hosted services are 10-20x cheaper than comparable SaaS offerings. This has nothing to do with the fact that it could be hit by a botnet, as per the exact point I commented on, could 'wreck your card', it's simply a question of scale.

No. Most self-hosted services have no bandwidth costs, at all.

Or they have bandwidth costs around a dollar per terabyte. Which, even when maxing your connections, would always be below your actual server costs.

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

#469

Post by troncheadle » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #444

troncheadle wrote: post #421

I have to say... I don't understand what about Firebase's offering is SO killer or unique. I feel like it would be very easy to roll one's own custom 'Firebase.' I'm unsure as to why anyone would ever choose to predicate their businesses continued existence on another platform, especially one that can be replicated in like, an afternoon.

Can you replicate it and open source it tomorrow afternoon please? :) I'll pay for your time. While what they did was certainly a dick move, this type of comments trivzializes and diminishes the work the firebase engineers put it. Incidentally it also implies that google is full of stupid execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon.

I can definitely do that. I only collect payments up front, so fork it over and I will have it for you tomorrow, likely even tonight.

I think what I said ("I don't understand what firebase does that is so killer or unique") is very different from what you are reading ("firebase is useless, firebase's engineers do stupid work, and google is full of student execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon"). I think your characterization of my statement is more than a bit unfair.

I'm still at a loss for what firebase is beyond a key value store with web sockets. I think it would be a problem to scale a platform like this on ones own -- maybe that's why to use Firebase? I've used it in hackathon settings where I didn't want to roll my own backend, or to mock web-sockets pre Django 1.9 / Channels.

Still, if I had a business that depended on a key value store with web sockets I would definitely build it myself.

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

#470

Post by troncheadle » Wed, May 17, 2017, 9:22 PM UTC

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #444

troncheadle wrote: post #421

I have to say... I don't understand what about Firebase's offering is SO killer or unique. I feel like it would be very easy to roll one's own custom 'Firebase.' I'm unsure as to why anyone would ever choose to predicate their businesses continued existence on another platform, especially one that can be replicated in like, an afternoon.

Can you replicate it and open source it tomorrow afternoon please? :) I'll pay for your time. While what they did was certainly a dick move, this type of comments trivzializes and diminishes the work the firebase engineers put it. Incidentally it also implies that google is full of stupid execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon.

A couple more things regarding the trivialization of the engineers work:

1: Just because work is done does not mean it is important 2: It is possible to say that the product is not special or unique and yet the hard work that is done to keep that product up all of the time and scale it to many of customers is special.