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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

#481

Post by chatmasta »

altin0 wrote: post #458
bobfunk wrote: post #317

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 pret…

Heck, at that point, why not "send some traffic" to your customer? It's not like they have any way of verifying its source. Hmm... why even send traffic at all? Just add a multiplier to their metrics!

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

#482

Post by tsimionescu »

littlestymaar wrote: post #387
tsimionescu wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.

But that's not what's happening: they aren't keeping a full host for you. Your argument is like saying that a bus traveler costs the gas needed to power the bus, but it's never the case: the bus would be cruising no matter what. And symmetrically the VM host would be up no matter what you did with your instance.

I'm not sure that's true. Shutting down unneeded hardware seems like a very simple but major optimization.

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

#485

Post by kkielhofner »

pacifika wrote: post #213
ignoramous wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Peering.

Here's how it works:

1) I have a big network and I exchange traffic with another big network. Think of "eyeball" networks like last-mile ISPs (Comcast, mobile providers, etc) where a substantial portion of end-user traffic is going to handfuls of well known networks - Cloudflare, AWS, Netflix, etc.

2) Comcast and Cloudflare say "Hey, I send you X TB/PB/etc and you send me X TB/PB/etc. We both currently pay another provider to route that traffic between us. Let's not do that."

3) In locations where it makes sense they basically throw a cable across datacenters, POPs, internet exchanges, etc. The cost for this is typically extremely low - it's basically a port on a switch/router on each side and MAYBE a "cross connect fee" from the facility. This is usually billed in the tens of dollars/mo if at all. It takes very little time/effort to configure this but of course the details are more complex - multiple ports, multiple facilities, etc.

4) Both sides start routing traffic between their networks over their new shiny direct cables and extremely high speed ports. Faster throughput, lower latency, improved reliability, frees up bandwidth to the transit provider they were using previously, and most importantly the cost of bandwidth between the two networks goes to zero.

This is all well known and publicly available because it's visible in the global routing table(s). Cloudflare, for example[0].

All of the large providers do this and AWS, etc charging in bandwidth per GB (especially at their rates) is more-or-less pure profit.

I have a theory that AWS, etc capitalize on people not really understanding this anymore. AWS is 20 years old - that's an entire generation of CTO/CIOs on down that are completely unfamiliar with these details and think $0.10/GB or whatever is "just what bandwidth costs". It is not.

[0] - https://bgp.he.net/AS13335#_peers

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

#486

Post by hirako2000 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #460
Hamuko wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I will put there the other obvious offender: Vercel . Not sure about bandwidth, but dark patterns, keeping serious RBAC procedures we'll hidden until asking a fortune even for startups, to provide not things like SSO, just reasonable RBAC.

With all that money they then can finance the free tier until they get too far and become platform locked-in.

Surge.sh Im not sure. But shows all the sign of some greedy acquisition, regular long outages , as if I have been sitting as a free tier for too long, quick nudge to pay. For barely accessed sites even behind CDNs, steep. I even worry they one day just wipe all my buckets (they did for a few already) and support would recommend me to be a "normal" paying user .

Nothing is free. And nothing too good to be true is true .

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

#487

Post by altin0 »

canyonero wrote: post #469
altin0 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pret…

This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?

It's only a weird take if you don't have any common sense. It's super simple: either offer unlimited bandwidth(since you're not charging these anyways), like Cloudflare Pages does, or put in place controls that will allow customer to set a top limit for their budget. You can't just all of a sudden send them a $104K bill and expect them to pay when the've never spent more than a few bucks. And then even worse, you can't pretend to expect them to pay 20%, then 5% then pretend you're doing them a favor by completely liftig it off. That's just arbitrary billing and preying for any victim that would fall and agree to pay 20% or 5% etc. I'm just asking for common sense and practices that build trust, not arbitraty billing rules.

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

#488

Post by davidguetta »

Is the entire idea of paying for bandwith not absurd ? You can't really control it

I have some websites with milions + autogenerated webpages and it's flooded by bot activity that I don't particularly care about.

I've blocked some through cloudflare but some look exactly like he describes: old machines with old versions of some OS and browser scattered around the globe that seem to be scanning my entire website, maybe for AI training purpose ?

The point is, I can't block them at all.

see this thread here : https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1azv0fs/is_this_tra...

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

#489

Post by jmgaicra »

canyonero wrote: post #469
altin0 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pret…

This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?

Any person seeing a user that normally has a $0/$10 per month bill suddenly spike to $104K would see that this is obviously a DDoS.

If it has always been a "policy" to forgive bills, shouldn't it have been 100% forgiven immediately after OP contacted support in the first place? Why go through the trouble of playing the hero by offering "discounts".

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

#490

Post by RamblingCTO »

spacemagic wrote: post #280
RamblingCTO wrote: post #241

Good reminder, just moved my blog to cloudflare pages!

I'm assuming they have DDoS protection by default, being a Cloudflare product? Or is the reasoning simply that they allow you to set a bandwidth/usage cap?

Yes, that was my understanding. Also unlimited bandwidth even on the free tier. So you get protection from DDoS and asshole business practices ;) Although there might be other caveats
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