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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

#501

Post by kuschku »

yunolisten wrote: post #500
kuschku wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you read the fine print of the ones with "no bandwidth costs" you'll find that service becomes throttled after a certain level of usage. These are businesses, they have to make money to operate, they're not in this for charity

Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling.

I’ve read the fine print, and called them.

Online, Scaleway, OVH, do not ever throttle you.

Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.

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

#502

Post by yunolisten »

kuschku wrote: post #501
yunolisten wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the fine print of the ones with "no bandwidth costs" you'll find that service becomes throttled after a certain level of usage. These are businesses, they have to make money to operate, they're not in this for charity

Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling. I’ve read the fine print, and called them. Online, Scaleway, OVH, do not ever throttle you. Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.

> Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling.

But legitimately using lots of bandwidth isn't the same as a DoS attack. Try and remember that bandwidth isn't the only resource being used.

> Scaleway

In my experience they throttle your CPU usage after a while.

> Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.

At no point did I suggest using Firebase was a good idea. I said it's always cheaper to run your own services in the long run, and that they'd have found out their own problems (see my first reply) sooner.

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

#503

Post by kalleboo »

mstade wrote: post #480
kalleboo wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bank (in Sweden) lets me generate virtual debit card numbers with a specified cost cap and expiration date. It's some ancient-looking Flash widget though so I suspect it's a legacy feature...

I'm in Sweden – which bank is this?

Swedbank. The feature is called "e-kort" and is found in the internet banking under "Kortöversikt".

The Flash UI looks like this http://mayoyo.tokyo/jJ7.png

They used to have a mobile app but it was discontinued since it didn't support 2FA.

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

#504

Post by victorNicollet »

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…

For a service that is billed based on a metric that only be measured by the provider, that provider has an important responsibility to accurately measure the metric, because important financial and technical decisions will be made based on that information. The fact that the metric was under-estimated (and therefore the costs were lower than they should have been) certainly constitutes some kind of compensation, the actual damages might be far beyond the temporary reduction in costs.

A feature might be rolled out "as is" to the entire user base after it was determined, on a small sample, that the costs per user were acceptable ; if the costs were greatly under-estimated, the company is left with a choice of discontinuing the feature (angering users) or scrambling to optimize the software, possibly starting from scratch with another technology. Or a yearly budget might have been designed based on usage estimates, only to be revealed as insufficient once actual estimates become available, and requiring an emergency cash injection for the company to pay for it.

I'm not a user of Firebase, but if our cloud provider (Microsoft Azure) were to announce that our costs had been underestimated by 2x or more, we would sue and argue that a 50% cost reduction for the past few years does not even begin to cover the strategic impact of the incorrect metric.

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

#505

Post by kuschku »

yunolisten wrote: post #502
kuschku wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling. I’ve read the fine print, and called them. Online, Scaleway, OVH, do not ever throttle you. Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.

> Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling. But legitimately using lots of bandwidth isn't the same as a DoS attack. Try and remember that bandwidth isn't the only resource being used. > Scaleway In my experience they throttle your CPU usage after a while. > Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Fir…

But my point is that you won't even ever have an issue with overusing traffic or CPU during a DoS, and the issue will be purely that your bandwidth will be saturated.

Vs. AWS, Firebase, etc where your limit will be your bank account instead.

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

#506

Post by BukhariH »

DomBlack wrote: post #11

> Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path! Isn't using AWS Lamba as your gateway, trapping you into using a specific service, just as much as firebase was?

AWS Lambda functions are super portable. You can essentially copy & paste them into a simple express.js app and be up and running in a few minutes.

But, either way I agree. You should always have all requests to any services going through your own domain.

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

#507

Post by jhall1468 »

manigandham wrote: post #449
jhall1468 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit Actually they are. Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains. Increasing prices helps your short term profit, but you tend to lose customers to competitors. Decreasing prices means less profit right now, but you tend to convert more customers. Companies aren't purely RIGHT NOW profit-driven. That's why many…

The timeframe does not change between my first phrase and the last. Overall (as in lifetime) the company is maximizing profits (as companies are designed to do). They certainly aren't "leaving money on the table" unless it's a plan to extract even more, so I don't see why that's so great as the GP comment says. They're good competition for the industry but I don't understand how their pricing automatically engenders…

> The timeframe does not change between my first phrase and the last.

The timeframe dictates behavior. But, you responded to a comment that said Amazon will leave money on the table, arguing that they won't. They will, and do, leave money on the short-term in order to benefit their long-term strategy.

Short-term vs Long-term profit motivations are actually MASSIVELY different sets of behaviors.

> That would actually be maximizing profit...

Yes, if you assume a company is infinite that's true. But since there's currently not a company that's existed forever, I can safely assume that such a thing doesn't exist.

You can't argue profit without arguing time. Particularly when your argument was that all companies focus on profit at the exclusion of all other things. Growth companies focus on growth over profit. And while, yes, over time that can result in more profit, it also may not. If pure profit were the only motivation, short-term MASSIVE profits would be the only goal ever, since it's vastly more real than potential profits if everything works out.

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

#508

Post by OkGoDoIt »

brianpgordon wrote: post #414
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.

Bank of America has this in the US.

Or at least they used to. I used to use it all the time on my Bank of America credit card but haven't used it in a few years. I just tried to use it last week and it seems like the option has disappeared. Maybe it's just bad web design, but I can't find it anywhere now.

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

#509

Post by brianpgordon »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #508
brianpgordon wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank of America has this in the US.

Or at least they used to. I used to use it all the time on my Bank of America credit card but haven't used it in a few years. I just tried to use it last week and it seems like the option has disappeared. Maybe it's just bad web design, but I can't find it anywhere now.

Go to your credit card summary page and scroll down. There's a box on the bottom right titled ShopSafe.

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

#510

Post by MaulingMonkey »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #254
MaulingMonkey wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providers to some degree get a free pass when they do their best to fix their mistakes. In Gitlab's case, their response was excellent and their total data loss was less than a day's work - and even that only for a full time manipulator of gitlab metadata (project managers? some parts of QA?): "Database data such as projects, issues, snippets, etc. created between January 31st 17:20 UTC and 23:30 UTC has been lost. G…

Chances are they also knew when they fixed the bug that it would result in price hikes. They could have easily generated a report showing which customers would be impacted, allowing them to contact them ahead of time.

From the followup updates, it sounds like Firebase actually tried to do this: https://medium.com/@startupandrew/firebase-founder-here-im-v...

Sounds like they've processed the credits as well, so that's good.

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