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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

#541

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

SoftTalker wrote: post #533

I once got a $65,000 water bill from the city for one month. I laughed and called them and asked them to re-read the meter and correct it, and expected a quick resolution. But no, they insisted it was correct for some time and that I needed to pay it. They said I probably had a leaky faucet or running toilet. There was no awareness on the part of the customer service people how ridiculous that was. It would be physic…

Water is a regulated utility. Anyone in a similar situation can contact the government authority who will gleefully tell the company to go to hell and possibly implement fines for inappropriate billing.

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

#542

Post by pants2 »

hnfong wrote: post #415
7moritz7 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a 60 TB in a day peak for a site that previously never crossed the free tier threshhold not qualify as "attack pattern"? This is a static site. To reach that sort of bandwidth out of nowhere you'd need to publish the blueprint for a teleportation machine

To be fair, these days, things can become viral literally overnight. That said, instead of depending on unreliable heuristics, they should just allow an option to change the behavior. The "current policy" to charge small sites on the free tier thousands of dollars instead of just throttling/shutting down the traffic is really predatory.

Most people won't want to fork over $100k to support a hobby project that's gone viral either.

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

#543

Post by tsimionescu »

littlestymaar wrote: post #502
tsimionescu wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You assume that the hardware would be unneeded, but that's a very strong assumption. It would be very bad for any cloud provider to leave hosts with only one VM running on it, and you can be pretty sure only very small minority of their park that end up in that situation where shutting down a single VM would lead to a shut-down of the entire host, because it means that the host was vastly under-used in the first plac…

As far as I know, most cloud hosts don't actually support automatically moving live VMs, so I think it's fairly common for a host to be left running a single VM.

At least in AWS, they never supported this, and in fact may require you to reboot an instance occasionally in order for it to be moved to a new hardware host (typically when they are upgrading their hardware).

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

#544

Post by sanitycheck »

charles_f wrote: post #531
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

> 1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral Sequence of events doesn't support this answer: 1. User gets charged 100k 2. User complains to support 3. User receives discount to 20k, then 5k. Support states policy is normally 20k 4. User discloses to the world. Goes viral. 5. Invoice is forgiven While you might forgive "lots and lots", fact is that you still present…

Quite... It does seem that either the story we're getting isn't completely accurate or the support people who handled this need a little reminder of what's supposed to happen.

I'm a paranoid person by nature so "It's free... just... give us your card details" is always suspicious.

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

#545

Post by silent_cal »

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.

Good on you for reaching out, but getting a bill like this in the first place is enough to send someone to the psych ward, lol.

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

#546

Post by tjosepo »

spacemagic wrote: post #270
tjosepo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Netlify project is assigned a Netlify subdomain (i.e. `example.netlify.app`) that cannot be removed or proxied. If anyone figures out what your Netlify subdomain is, it's my understanding that they can DDoS you and there's nothing you can do about it.

That makes sense, but is the Netlify subdomain visible from your custom domain? How would they be able to figure it out, other than humans leaking it somehow?

It should not be visible, but security-by-obscurity is not something that makes me sleep well at night.

It's a design limitation of Netlify that might cost you $100,000 some day.

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

#547

Post by sph »

ignoramous wrote: post #129
ji_zai wrote: post #74

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere. Just went through Vercel's docs: --- "Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically miti…

> 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.

> 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.

Yeah that's how Cloudflare can reach total control over the Internet. With thunderous applause by people that should know better.

I know that my position is outright blasphemous in this day and age, where even self-hosting a static site has become black magic and we need a third party to do it for us.

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

#548

Post by wendyshu »

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.

Is the support employee going to be fired for making such a traumatizing mistake? Or was 5% ok until this went viral?

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

#549

Post by conductr »

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,…

> I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly, yes it costs me more per month but the price is hard capped.

I still prefer this too. Kinda funny how server resource limitations became a feature and not a bug when it was one of the problems the cloud sought to overcome

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

#550

Post by silent_cal »

isoprophlex wrote: post #14

There's no way in hell anyone should ever under any circumstance use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really. Just suspend service on excessive overages...

Totally agree, it's an unacceptable risk
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