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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

#661

Post by tsimionescu »

littlestymaar wrote: post #651
tsimionescu wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you have 3 hosts, each with a capacity of 10 VMs. At some point you have 28 running VMs - 10 on host1, 10 on host2, 8 on host3. Someone then closes down 2 of the VMs on host1, and 7 of the VMs on host3. Now you have 19 VMs running, but need to keep all 3 hosts powered. If you don't have live VM moving, you are now forced to keep Host3 running only because 1 VM is running on it, even if that VM is idle. So, this o…

Except you don't have 3 hosts but 3 thousands, and during the time you're stopping the 9 VMs somebody else is starting 5 or 15 new ones! Yes it is similar to memory fragmentation in some way, but your argument is like saying an integer stored on the heap costs a full memory page! You realize that it's nonsense. Sure in extreme edge cases it can, but that's not a good metric to know the memory footprint of an integer!…

Of course, it's not gonna be common. But it will occasionally happen, in such a large data center.

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

#663

Post by [deleted] »

aurareturn wrote: post #331
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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#664

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#665

Post by Super_Jambo »

canyonero wrote: post #469
altin0 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol this deescalated pretty quickly, went from $104K to $20K to $5K to $0 Which basically means you almost scammed the customer for $5K or $20K. Super negative practices. I for one could never trust a company operating in that manner. It would be much more honest to say "unlimited bandwidth" and set a hard-limit for maximum budget, then people know they won't be charged, than to go through all this crap and then pret…

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?

The user was asked to pay 20% then 5k on a service that's called "free" but has some extras which actually cost money.

After this the CEO comes along and says that the policy is actually not to bill for this kind of event... But the company actually tried to bill this user 3 times... soo it all stinks really.

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

#666

Post by Einenlum »

Being able to set a soft limit (email me when I go beyond it) and a hard limit (shut down my service) seems like a very simple solution. How is it not a thing in 2024?

Also, being at the mercy of a CEO and their understanding is a no go, whether you're a company or an individual. We want to be 100% sure we're not going to get bankrupt when using a service. "Don't worry, our policy is to usually erase the debt" is not an appropriate answer.

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

#667

Post by KyleJune »

TheDataMaverick wrote: post #582
KyleJune wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like they are intentionally making it complicated to figure out to avoid people actually setting hard limits. Vercel recently had a customer get charged 20k+ that posted on twitter. When Vercel employees mentioned this way of controlling it through a webhook, most people didn't even know about it. I feel like a hard limitbshould be easy to set in your projects settings and that it should have a default value…

@KyleJune I would consider extremely difficult to setup a reliable system that could listen to webhooks and pause projects. My main concerns are .. how can you test it and how can you be sure that it is working in all future. .. Are you able to find the twitter post you mentioned?

I found the example I mentioned, it was from earlier this month.

Here is a link to the twitter post where someone got a 23k bill. In the thread you can find people confused about how this could have happened and why there are not hard limits to prevent situations like this. https://twitter.com/michaelaubry/status/1757539928534315322?...

Here is a comment in the thread from their VP of product explaining how to set hard limits via a web hook. They said they would improve the documentation for it but some people replied saying they shouldn't need a web hook to set usage limits. https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1757960730865696892?t=mCD...

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

#669

Post by dns_snek »

gazelle21 wrote: post #589
skeeter2020 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS budgets are good for the first part, but they have no interest in a hard cap for obvious reasons.

Im out of the loop, what obvious reasons?

They profit when their customers can't hard limit their spend and end up racking up large bills by accident, or for reasons outside of their control.

By the way, your comment was flagged which seemed odd, so I looked at your profile and it seems like all of your comments are being (automatically?) flagged and don't appear on HN by default. You might want to talk to the HN staff about that.

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

#670

Post by Nition »

moritonal wrote: post #215
Nition wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Elsewhere in these comments there's a link to a support thread[0] where Netlify support essentially says you shouldn't ever need an option to suspend your site at a certain point because: #1. If you think there's any chance of getting DDoSd, you should already be on a business plan instead of a starter tier. #2. If you think there's any chance of your site going viral, you're going to want to pay the cost anywa…

So anyone whos site might be posted to HN should be on a business plan.

I'd think Hacker News actually comes under #2. If 100,000 people come from Hacker News to look at your hobby site about the Aamber Pegasus, you're supposed to think of how you've improved their lives by letting them read about it.
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