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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

#641

Post by godzillabrennus »

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.

I'm so grateful that Cloudflare has Pages, and I was able to move my hosting needs there. Netlify has been expensive for a while now.

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

#642

Post by amtamt »

pierat wrote: post #625
nazka wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it’s nice like that. Specially for side projects on AWS that could go wrong on your personal credit card. Also I heard they forgave bills sometimes.

Amazon will, but they also gauge their discount in how many prevention and security measures from their 5 Pillars you follow in your environment. You can do stuff like "disallow any of these instances to be used in your env", so if you never use graphics cards, disallow the whole class. You can also set limits like "no more than 20x m5.4xlarge". But again, AWS is the worst about no actual hard limits, cause each syst…

When people have to read and implement "5 pillars" or "cloud adoption frameworks" before start using cloud, learning stuff like hosting with hetzner or self hosting start to seems like comparatively easy and simple.

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

#643

Post by miles »

dang wrote: post #525
BigJono wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely with the underlying principles, I just think once the CEO has commented and stirred up some interesting discussion that's relevant to a large segment of your userbase, the thread doesn't really belong to some generic "customer service shitstorms" category anymore. I learnt more about Netlify, Vercel etc and how they operate from this thread from the last 100 "customer service" threads combined. I l…

Ok, let's try that and see what happens!

Thanks dang. This was one of the most important posts on HN for me since inception, and prompted my own immediate migration away from Netlify hosting[1]. I would hazard a guess that there are many Netlify users on HN, and becoming aware of the unlimited billing exposure (as well as Netlify's official policy (such as it is)) makes for important reading.

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202402260700_netlify-to-cloudflare...

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

#644

Post by Gormo »

raiyu wrote: post #418
noir_lord wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

> What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties.

Sort of, but the approach to the approach isn't great. If you're going to void charges from DDOS traffic anyway, you might as well make that explicit policy, rather than doing it after the fact in a way that seems discretionary.

The Reddit thread is full of people who are saying that they intend to pull their static content off of Netlify and move it to Cloudflare Pages, which has no overages on the free tier in the first place. I can tell you that I personally chose Cloudflare Pages to set up a new static site a couple of weeks ago, and Netlify wasn't even in the running.

If Netlify's free tier is important to their customer acquisition strategy, then they really need to retool how they're offering it, or Cloudflare is going to eat their lunch.

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

#645

Post by davidguetta »

immibis wrote: post #585
davidguetta wrote: post #488

Is the entire idea of paying for bandwith not absurd ? You can't really control it I have some websites with milions + autogenerated webpages and it's flooded by bot activity that I don't particularly care about. I've blocked some through cloudflare but some look exactly like he describes: old machines with old versions of some OS and browser scattered around the globe that seem to be scanning my entire website, mayb…

There are providers that change you for connection speed and have no limits besides that. They're more expensive.

I guess the questions starts for more important websites.

I pay 10 euro / month for 3 python apps (inluding the one with the bot traffic around 22 Gb per month).

For static websites anything more would be insane

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

#646

Post by guytv »

JW_00000 wrote: post #144
iforgotpassword wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

But then where would you run a small hobby project that you'd like to run in the cloud? I have some small stuff I'm running on Google Cloud Platform, and honestly I'm scared of the same thing happening to me because there's no easy way to set a limit. But AWS and Azure have the same policy. (In my case, I'm looking for somewhere I can easily deploy a set of ~5 Docker containers, they don't need to scale up, and it's…

I run my hobby projects on GCP. There's a daily spend limit you can set.

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

#647

Post by CogitoCogito »

Jgrubb wrote: post #478
CogitoCogito wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this has been asked here multiple times without response from /u/bobfunk, it’s hard to conclude anything except that he is lying.

Or that usage and billing is a difficult space and this particular thread has been dogpiled by a bunch of folks that have never actually worked in it.

His claims are directly contradicted by his employee's actions. When asked about this, he provides no clarification. I just don't understand why you'd consider him even remotely believable.

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

#649

Post by piperswe »

Arnavion wrote: post #252
rubymamis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to sign up but it keeps saying "Verification is taking longer than expected. Check your Internet connection and refresh the page if the issue persists." Does anyone else experience this as well?

That's the Cloudflare user experience in a nutshell. Your users will see the same thing when they visit your Cloudflare-hosted site.

As a heads up, you can disable challenges almost entirely if you don't want any visitors challenged. Security -> Settings -> Security Level -> Essentially off

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

#650

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

bobfunk wrote: post #351
aurareturn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two questions everyone have: 1. Would Netlify forgive the bill if this didn't go viral? 2. How do you plan to address this issue so that it never happens again? Everyone here knew someone from Netlify would come and say OP wouldn't have to pay. That was a given. Now we want to know the important answers.

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

Do we have anything more binding than your word to rely on?

From what I see you could change this policy tomorrow unilaterally and we would have no recourse.

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