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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

#561

Post by Izkata »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #443
hnfong wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

60TB with each request for 1Mb say would be 60000000 visitors. So guess this is possible but hell of unlikely.

"static site" doesn't necessarily mean "small". It would be easy to go way over 1Mb with a couple of pictures.

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

#562

Post by conductr »

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.

How about just fix the pricing formula to account for massive surges.

Instead of forcing user to set a low cost limit and missing a viral opportunity or the platform writing off the massive bill the customer can't afford... just put the billing mode into a reduced price mode or have some more nuanced configurations. Sometimes is just asking the question the right way. Instead of "max spend limit" or similar "If your site goes viral, how many requests do you want to serve before going offline? 1M=$20, 10M=$100, etc" at this point, I feel like bandwidth consumption is a bad metric for billing; just use requests/visits/actions and price for those.

This is not prescriptive just illustrative. The point is make a better pricing formula to account for these massively unexpected events. Couple it with an aggressive notification policy when this traffic event gets triggered. The user should know the traffic pattern has changed and a high traffic event is happening. They can login and change the configs and decide if they want to keep it going or not.

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

#563

Post by ygjb »

nico wrote: post #530
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…

> 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 Of course. And that’s why any limit against a dynamic variable should also have alerts linked to it Send an alert to the user when traffic starts spiking, especially if a simple projection shows it’s going to go over their limit Then the user is aware, hopefull…

That's a level of responsiveness that doesn't exist for the vast majority of organizations.

If your customer is aware enough to notice they are being hit with a DOS or legit traffic while it is happening, then great! They can respond, and if needed, engage proserve to get support for scaling or defense depending on needs.

If your customer is not alert enough, then their site is offline, and they won't hear about it until their customers are screaming at them, which will result in a P1 ticket to look at a vendor who won't turn them off during an unexpected peak.

It's a catch 22, and if you have to choose between: a) a PR hit because you have to go on a forum and post about waiving the fee, or b) a PR hit because someone posted a blog post about how you killed their site during a moment of critical growth

any reasonable business will choose A every time because A is far more supportive of customer growth and has drastically better optics. Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion.

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

#564

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#565

Post by mr337 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #541
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.

I wish that was so straight forward. You can google this incident where an empty lot got a 35K water bill and the water company said it was an error, then backtracked on that and still saying 35K is due.

> Towards the end of 2023, the DWM seemingly corrected the issue. Revive received an email stating: “The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions. Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24.” However, DWM soon backtracked and claimed that the $219.24 quote was made in error and that the nearly $30,000 balance still applied.

https://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2024/02/26/empty-atlanta-lot-...

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

#566

Post by mattferderer »

noir_lord wrote: post #461
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…

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. That seems like bordering on fraud tbh. > Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usu…

> So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?.

Funny story... One of the big cloud providers actually has you do that on purpose as a remedy for an account you've lost access to.

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

#567

Post by nickjj »

safety1st wrote: post #554
ohnoitsahuman wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A debt is still a debt even charged back. There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.

No, not really. Not really what attorneys do. There might be collections agencies interested in recovering the debt, but if it's some rando guy who doesn't have the money, even that is open to debate. I mean I'm not familiar with every debt collection scenario under the sun but Internet randos seem to think this is a real thing where like a cloud/hosting company sends an army of lawyers to repo some guy's house and r…

> I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days?

The responsibility part is the tricky part of the equation.

If someone hits your site with a DDoS attack, are you responsible? There's literally nothing[0] you can do as a customer of a cloud provider here because anything you can do is limited to the servers and services you're given access to. For example even if I had access to billions of requests and built an anti-DDoS tool it would still need to run within the cloud provider's provisioned server which means I'd be on the hook for all traffic costs because it's something running in my account.

That doesn't seem reasonable to me as a customer. It means a cloud hosting provider can put an extreme financial burden on a customer and make a killing in profits because of the markup they charge on bandwidth. The incentives are terribly misaligned.

[0]: I mean you can sign up for DDoS protection through a 3rd party company but in this case I'm talking about taking actions within your hosting provider.

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

#568

Post by baggachipz »

silent_cal wrote: post #545
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.

Email:

> "You've got room to grow!"

ohfuckohfuckohfuck

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

#569

Post by immibis »

carlmr wrote: post #380
immibis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or use a provider with a predictable cost structure. There are PLENTY. You didn't need to choose this exact one.

The problem is that it isn't entirely clear which ones have predictable cost to the non-lawyers eye. I.e. they should have to have sane defaults, like reasonable spending limits and opt-out, by regulation, since the market is failing here.

It was clear though. Does Netlify not tell you their bandwidth pricing?

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

#570

Post by pier25 »

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.

> instead forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes after the fact

That's terrible for marketing.

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