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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

#731

Post by nick238 »

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…

Frequently I'm looking up if there's a way to have a hard limit on AWS billing, and it seems like many other people have the same concern as well. I do understand that the massively distributed system hosting 100+ products each with ~10 things to bill for means you can't have each service going to the magic billing limiter service and be ask "can account X spend 0.000001 USD now?" * every request * every cloud tenant, etc, etc.

That said, I still think there should be an easy way to set a daily limit. Should I use the Budget service to do that? Cost Explorer? Billing Alarms? Is it possible to have them shed whatever's spending all the money?...

Again, I see the whole can of worms here: what if your service is jamming tons of data into S3 because of a bug? Or you actually started something that got popular and you have a gigantic Dynamo table? Stopping an EC2 instance is maybe an easy call, but deleting data is iffy.

AWS just feels like a minefield because I'm occasionally worried with all the products, I'll check a box when creating an instance or SG or whatever, and that'll (e.g.) trigger CloudWatch to read all my logs, but I have some crappy debug config for some app which will vomit out dozens of logs a second accidentally, and instead of just trashing `/var/log/` I get billed for millions of log events or something.

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

#733

Post by bombcar »

kkielhofner wrote: post #485
pacifika wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

Peering. Here's how it works: 1) I have a big network and I exchange traffic with another big network. Think of "eyeball" networks like last-mile ISPs (Comcast, mobile providers, etc) where a substantial portion of end-user traffic is going to handfuls of well known networks - Cloudflare, AWS, Netflix, etc. 2) Comcast and Cloudflare say "Hey, I send you X TB/PB/etc and you send me X TB/PB/etc. We both currently pay a…

People don’t really and have never fully understood this - and why Netflix using a lower tier provider with bad peering caused companies to … not upgrade their links.

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

#734

Post by bradly »

remram wrote: post #729
bradly wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple years ago I switched from a standard, contract-based US cell phone plan to a prepaid service it has felt so much more natural. Have a messed up my autopay and my phone just stop working in the middle of the day? Yep. But You just find some WIFI, pay, and its back on in minutes. I know exactly what my service costs: $35 dollars. No fees, taxes.

That sounds awful and it's not even cheap!

I guess that shows how bad the alternative is.

How much is unlimited talk, text, data, hotspot with a watch data add-on where you are from?

edit: Actually I was wrong–it is $30, not $35.

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

#735

Post by listenallyall »

icelain wrote: post #652
lelanthran wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app? I'm not sure about VueJS specifically, but I run everything I can off a $6/m digital ocean droplet (static sites, web apps, git repos, RDBMS, some other custom apps I've written) and it hasn't broken a sweat yet[1]. My understanding used to be that requests will be dropped if my virtual server can't handle it, and I'll have to transfer 10,000TB to get to a $100,000…

Having a personal VPS is the way. I run a SvelteJS app as well as my personal website, blog and a couple other services on a $6 droplet and it runs great.

I agree with both of your philosophies and also run a VPS. However, lots of people would have no idea how to manage a server from scratch or to install a web server, even a static one. Netlify really is pretty amazingly simple for what it offers, which is a lot. And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.

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

#736

Post by listenallyall »

jari_mustonen wrote: post #342
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.

"Current policy?" So, you will retain a right to change such fees when you feel like it. This is a serious matter. We are building a new site for our company with Netlify, but we can't open ourselves to this predatory practice. And even if you do not mean to be predatory, even the option of such is enough. If not resolved with a clean, legally binding promise, our company (and probably quite a few others) must move o…

Why are you asking this question here? Any actual company would have reviewed all the legal documents prior to choosing a provider. The promises you seek are the exact reason "enterprise-grade" providers can (and do) charge so much.

edit: hey guess what, Netlify offers an enterprise plan, I'd bet they will be happy to offer you a "clean, legally binding promise": https://www.netlify.com/pricing/?category=enterprise

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

#737

Post by nemothekid »

dns_snek wrote: post #723
nemothekid wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This doesn't seem like a rational thing to do. A trillion dollar business built on people making mistakes and actually running up a bill? Which exec is getting a bonus when little Johnny gets hit with a $1000 charge on his CS101 project? Doesn't seem likely. 2. To me, it's more likely they don't have one because there are edge cases to consider that make "hard limits" difficult to implement. What is AWS supposed t…

1. Even if you assume perfectly good intentions, they're not incentivized to fix the problem because they're not on the hook for the bill, but stand to profit from it. Their margins are eye-watering, so sending out a $100k bill for a service which cost them no more than $5 to provide doesn't have a downside (other than bad PR, which they seem to be blind to). If providing this bandwidth cost them $50k rather than $5,…

>If providing this bandwidth cost them $50k rather than $5,

No, I believe you are assuming that proving a "hard limit" feature is cheaper than just refunding people from time to time. If you consider the all the products AWS has to offer, all the different ways they are billed, then figuring out what do to for each product once that limit is reached, and potentially doing a destructive action, and then all the code and testing on top of that - it seems far easier to add a human in the loop to just refund people on a case by case basis. It's a ton of complexity for likely a rare issue, and if someone really needs it they can build one themselves and choose how to handle what needs to be done once the limit is reached.

Building all this out just so that some college kid isn't charged a bill they could obviously never pay likely isn't a good use of resources. It's not likely AWS has a reputation of being greedy either, if you explain the situation they refund you. If they are truly doing this to make money they have remarkably poor execution.

>It's really not that hard.

Storage pricing isn't done up front. You pay per gigabyte-month. If your "hard limit" kicks in, then what does Amazon do with the data you are no longer paying to store? Does Amazon drop your entire database once the credit limit is reached? There are plenty of Amazon services like this. Consider secret manager. You are charged 40 cents/month per secret. You have 100 secrets, so $40/mo, but you set your hard limit to $20. The middle of the month rolls around, what does Amazon do? Do they just drop all your encryption keys?

There are 100s of AWS services and many where you can't just apply a sensible rejection policy once you hit that hard limit without doing something the user cannot recover from. It's only not hard because you aren't actually thinking about the matrix of AWS products that exist and how they are billed.

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

#738

Post by rpgwaiter »

mathgradthrow wrote: post #722
jotaen wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

How on earth could I, as a customer, be sure that netlify hadn't paid someone to DDOS me? If I were in charge of a business like that, I would have that thought constantly...

Why go through that effort when they could just lie about site usage and say you incurred a bunch of traffic? Or make fake site "hits" from localhost?

It's really the trade-off for using any cloud host. You are implicitly trusting the host, their monitoring tools, their billing system, and their customer support when things go wrong

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

#739

Post by Havoc »

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...

> use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really.

Like all of the big clouds with free tiers and nuke it from orbit level footguns lying about everywhere?

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

#740

Post by nfw2 »

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.

OP said they agreed to reduce the payment, which means they acknowledged it was an attack but still wanted payment
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