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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

#511

Post by dang »

BigJono wrote: post #477
hasty_pudding wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the CEO had to step in after this blew up online otherwise they were going to try to extort that poor dude for thousands of dollars! Moving my sites off of netlify ASAP.

Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"

About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for.

In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#512

Post by jotaen »

ks2048 wrote: post #446
valine wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

Same. I'm looking at alternatives to get off netlify ASAP.

For static sites, I’m quite happy with Cloudflare Pages + Github deploy action. (https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-action)

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

#513

Post by Repulsion9513 »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #367
toomuchtodo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv

Nowadays for customers spending millions of dollars you'd expect (at least, Amazon would expect) that the customer has a FinOps department who are already working on getting the most 'bang for their buck' out of what they're paying for and minimising their spend, and they would jump to another platform in a heartbeat if they thought they could save money. It's not unreasonable to think that you don't need to do these…

AWS will save us so much money! We don't have to pay for people to look after hardware! ... just pay for people to set up AWS, and maintain AWS, and make sure we're not paying thousands extra for AWS...

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

#514

Post by typon »

aurareturn wrote: post #500
raiyu wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The infantilization of the user is common in tech now. For good reasons? Maybe. But it is common.

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

#515

Post by fuzzfactor »

whatever1 wrote: post #43
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For less than 1% of OP's monthly bill, you can build or obtain a more-than-enough server, drop your static files on it, and serve through nginx. And you get to keep it forever; there's no monthly subscription fee! Seriously, maybe I'm just old, but I look at the pricing of these hip and modern SaaS products for dead simple software and I cannot believe my eyes. The "old fashioned way" works just fine (and has always…

But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room

Dynamic type IP doesn't usually change for no reason, work around whatever instability you have, set BIOS so PC auto-restarts and OS launches apps when failed power returns, get a mini fanless PC which can be easily concealed, and you don't even need to tell anyone who doesn't have a need to know.

Whether that includes your wife or not is up to you ;)

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

#516

Post by BigJono »

dang wrote: post #511
BigJono wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many po…

I don't really buy that to be honest.

I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions.

And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.

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

#517

Post by jeroenhd »

chatmasta wrote: post #491
jeroenhd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't really matter how Netlify ends up paying for their traffic, at the end of the day, there's a bill to be paid.

In your example, a DDoS sucking down bandwidth would cost more than a DDoS would had it been about total transfer volume. Their servers can only produce a set amount of network traffic at a time and on one single day, this one customer sucked up 5½gbps continuously, based on the 60TB figure provided in the reddit post.

This kind of extremely bursty traffic takes capacity that would otherwise be usable for tens or hundreds of customers, but to meet their guarantees, they must scale out massively to catch these bursts. I think it makes sense that making them dip into their bandwidth reserves should cost more than the average cost of a network transfer.

I don't know the actual costs Netlify has, and I'm sure the support rep saying they can drop this down to 20% or even 5% shows that there's a buffer here, but the 5 grand OP was asked to pay seems to come awful close to what you would pay on other high-reliability providers, such as Amazon. The max fee is probably to push their expensive customers into special deals (or to their competitors), but I find their 5% offer quite reasonable.

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

#518

Post by canyonero »

herbst wrote: post #474
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?

What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.

Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.

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

#519

Post by dang »

BigJono wrote: post #516
dang wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many po…

I don't really buy that to be honest. I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions. And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particu…

You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls.

I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long.

Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform.

If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.

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

#520

Post by jotaen »

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.

One additional feedback, for consideration: to me, your Pricing page[1] doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that the “Starter” plan may incur costs at all (let alone in this ballpark). It’s now more apparent when looking at it in hindsight, but you have to either read very carefully, or go to the separate “View Features” page to understand this.

“0$ to get started, then pay as you go” reads to me: “0$ to get started, and then you can order add-ons and extra features as you need them”, not “$0 to get started, but we may start charging you virtually unlimited amounts at any point without prior notice”.

When signing up for the “Starter” tier initially, I completely misunderstood this. I didn’t have to enter any credit card or invoice details, so I thought as long as you don’t have that info from me, you can’t and won’t bill anything.

[1]: https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

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