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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

#491

Post by chatmasta »

jeroenhd wrote: post #204
hayst4ck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's unbounded liability. Not to mention the strong conflict of interest for netlify, who stands to gain from their customers being attacked. Netlify is getting paid for something criminal in nature having occurred. It's like who is responsible for credit card fraud? If customers are responsible for credit card fraud, and it's their responsibility not to get scammed, then who implements fraud prevention measu…

Companies like these give out ridiculously huge free tiers in the hopes that very few users end up using the high free bandwidth limits. In most cases, they do. However, they do need to make their money back somehow. I don't really get why people put their tiny static sites on hosts designed to never fall over no matter the traffic generated, no matter the situation. You're running a blog, not a government service. Y…

> they do need to make their money back somehow

You're assuming Netlify is paying for bandwidth in $/GB, when in reality they're probably paying $/gbps and thus have no costs to cover when a customer temporarily bursts their bandwidth.

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

#492

Post by tombolino »

Voultapher wrote: post #152
dhaavi wrote: post #7

> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.

They overcharge egress by about 500x https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress . So even a reduction to 0.2% would habe been possible. Honestly don't understand why anyone feels comfortable overpaying so much. Especially when there is no configurable spending limit.

no, they charge 6x according to that table. Because they are using aws

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

#493

Post by [deleted] »

noir_lord wrote: post #378
bobfunk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in. i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline". Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you. This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly,…

[deleted]

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

#494

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#495

Post by awill »

bobfunk wrote: post #351
aurareturn wrote: post #331

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

I’m sorry. You are working on changing things so FREE sites don’t get charged???

That’s the elephant in the room here. I understand an enterprise plan where you state billing is $xx per GB, but billing someone with a free site??

Give me a break.

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

#496

Post by tombolino »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #75
gullevek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like in the past, when you went over your limit your page went offline. The good old Slashdot effect

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

first of all these cloud services are designed especially for that, for autoscaling. Second of all, if these are hobby projects we cannot look every hour the costs etc unlike people who's that their job. So stop calling people lazy and pretend like you are better than others because you are not.

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

#497

Post by chomp »

altin0 wrote: post #487
canyonero wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Pay for what you use" is an arbitrary billing rule? Come on now.

OP was ignorant, and got tossed a lifeline. Also “just make everything zero dollars bro” is a ridiculous proposition.

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

#498

Post by romphl »

mlrtime wrote: post #454
gaza3g wrote: 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.

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!

I mean, social media is pretty much an inevitability once mobile phones/internet became mainstream. Just like the invention of the gun and gunpowder, I think we are still debating if it was good for society right to this day.

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

#499

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

raiyu wrote: post #418
noir_lord wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in. i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline". Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you. This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly,…

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…

Here's an idea: let users set a spending limit.

If they're about to go over, shoot them a quick heads-up and give them 24 hours to sort things out or level up their package.

After that, if they haven't made any changes, temporarily pause their site access

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

#500

Post by aurareturn »

raiyu wrote: post #418
noir_lord wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in. i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline". Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you. This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly,…

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…

  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.
But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. You're giving the control back to the user.
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