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

#511

Post by MaulingMonkey » Sat, May 20, 2017, 12:59 AM UTC

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #191

moduspol wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they should get a free pass, but I don't think they should be beholden forever to be under-metering traffic if they made a mistake and weren't counting part of it (as it seems to be the case here). To that extent, they should have communicated this better, ideally 90 days out perhaps even with phone calls for customers whose bill will increase notably.

I'd even settle for crediting affected accounts to help smooth out the transition reactively, which it sounded like they started to do. But then they failed to follow through.

They've followed through now!

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

#512

Post by born2web » Sun, May 21, 2017, 11:22 AM UTC

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…

just out of curiosity, is there a way to set a spending limit? Or at least an alert when crossing a spending threshold?

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

#513

Post by HodGreeley » Mon, May 22, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

benjaminl wrote: post #206

archiepeach wrote: post #56

Is there a large difference between using Firebase Database and another hosted DBaaS, such as MongoDB Atlas? I use Firebase Database but keep it arms length by avoiding any of the proprietary features it offers. I use it exclusively as a JSON store which I feel I can easily export at any time if I wanted to switch to another NoSQL DBaaS. A few people here are mentioning how it's crazy to depend on external services f…

Firebase is one of the very few products to offer controllable client data replication for full offline first functionality. For apps that have significant offline requirements, this functionality can save a significant amount of time and significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and more importantly maintained. One of my clients just recently seriously considered going with Firebase. The choic…

Thanks for the kudos. The team works very hard to make the offline first capabilities best in class.

I'm not sure who at Couchbase is "strongly" recommending against the Community Edition. Of course we'd like to have people on the Enterprise Edition, but I think the information is out there to make an informed decision. You should only be getting a hard push away from CE if they really believe you'll need the support. Anyway, this is good feedback.

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

#514

Post by HodGreeley » Mon, May 22, 2017, 5:23 AM UTC

dutchbrit wrote: post #85

Is there any open source product that offers everything that firebase does?

Couchbase Mobile is open source. Couchbase only provides the data platform, but is significantly more sophisticated at it than Firebase. Firebase offers many other services, so you can't really make a direct comparison. In simple terms, the way I think of it, Firebase goes wide, offering a package with many elements, while Couchbase goes deep on one area, the data platform. (FYI I work at Couchbase.)

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

#515

Post by sleepydog » Mon, May 22, 2017, 11:22 PM UTC

muraiki wrote: post #274

delhanty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment. 16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is…

Thanks for sharing this. I had recently set up an account with FastMail, but now that it's clear that they won't abide by their own promises, I'll look elsewhere.

I'm a long-time and happy Fastmail user. I'm not defending their decision, but I personally never trust "lifetime" plans of any kind -- it's impossible for a business to know they can sustain you forever, and dishonest for them to say they can.

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

#516

Post by Top19 » Fri, May 26, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

victorhooi wrote: post #450

Top19 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hired a freelancer from the Philippines on Upwork to work with me on some Google App Engine issues because Google's documentation is incredibly unhelpful at times and as well as bizarrely organized. He was from the Philippines, and it turned out he was a contractor providing "support" for Google Cloud. So I guess Google is outsourcing their support? Isn't this something Dell tried to do in the 90's with disastrous…

Regarding your first issue - I'm sorry to hear you had documentation issues. There should be a huge "Send Feedback" widget at the bottom of every single documentation page: http://i.imgur.com/MhWbY0W.png http://i.imgur.com/Gu8GzLB.png (If you click it, it will pop up this modal form, which also allows you to just screenshot the offending part). Did you try using this link on any of the pages that you found unhelpful,…

Actually a PM I reached out to a couple of months ago did get back to me. I was disappointed at first because I heard nothing from Google Next could be uploaded online.

But Google did come through and they posted the images here: https://cloud.google.com/storage-options/

That had been my complaint...that the documentation was hard to get and that when I saw the images presented at Next I understood things that I had previously given up on.