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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

#781

Post by fetzu »

valine wrote: post #349
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’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

Did exactly the same, moving everything over to Cloudflare took me less than 15 minutes. “We’ll forgive those cases, pinky swear” is not a valid excuse when putting (even opt-in) hard limits in place is technically viable.

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

#782

Post by twixfel »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #417
twixfel wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't check for every possible thing that can go wrong, otherwise we wouldn't have time to do anything. I remember when I got charged a "cancelling fee" for cancelling my Adobe subscription that accidentally went past its free trial. The situation was so ludicrous that I had never imagined that they would charge something like 6 months worth of subs me to cancel a monthly subscription. In the end I got out of…

Sorry, maybe this is a generational thing? I always look for a catch when something is "free". Your example as old as time, offer a free trial period but if you don't cancel X days before it ends, you automatically subscribe for another week/month/year. This has extended to getting a big discount for your first year after signup and then you pretty much have to cancel and go to a competitor, or wait until a couple da…

You do not understand. Of course I know that if I fail to cancel, then I must keep paying. I had a month's subscription. At worst I expected to pay for one extra month of subscription before I remembered to cancel. I was OK with that perceived risk and understood it.

What I did not expect: to cancel one month of subscription you must pay 6 months of subscription as a cancellation fee. Maybe you expect that, but I have seen that anywhere else and did not expect it.

>So yes, sorry, as the other reply says, I might come across uncharitable or even condescending, but as tech people developing tech stuff how can one not be at least a little careful when there's a big "free candy" sign slapped onto something?

It wasn't free candy in my case, I was paying.

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

#783

Post by boeing767 »

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

"wOrKiNg oN"

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

#784

Post by bravetraveler »

jart wrote: post #772
bravetraveler wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually you're probably going to want an ipset, at least. Otherwise processing your chain will continuously cost more, and more, and more.

I just declare firewall jubilee every now and then, where I flush the iptables and let people try again. It's also because people usually only control the IPs they use temporarily, so I don't want someone innocent later on to be blocked from using the service because someone abusive used their IPs beforehand. But even if I didn't do this, it doesn't cost much for Linux to iterate over an array of blocked int32's. It'…

I'm glad you make a point to flush the chain/let things retry. I often hear about people adding drops.. to just then forget about them

I saw millions and started to feel my heart race a little

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

#785

Post by Jaaneek »

leerob wrote: post #464
dstroot wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone share an example of edge middleware that might protect you on Vercel?

You can also turn on soft and hard spend limits on Vercel (including SMS alerts) https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-spend-management-realtim...

This is not a hard limit, this is just a webhook and you need to handle disabling everything on your own.

1. You can make mistakes in your code.

2. Some junior developer can by mistake change the code and make it ineffective.

3. Webhook is not instant so you can get billed more than the limit.

4. There is no information which project hit the limit, so you need to Fetch all of your project ID's and then disable all of them. You need to basically disable all the projects assigned to your team/organization.

5. Vercel doesn't guarantee in any way that you won't get billed more, they are just sending an information to you (with a delay).

Hard limit should be a deal between user and company that the user won't ever get billed more than X$

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

#786

Post by mhitza »

thingification wrote: post #728
mhitza wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my own projects I do Terraform/Pulumi + Ansible. I use Hetzner & DigitalOcean and this setup works great with both. I don't use docker for my projects, as I deploy on RHEL like systems which I'm intimately familiar how to configure (and have snippets I mix and match).

You use both terraform and ansible in the same project? I always thought of them as competitors filling more or less the same role, do you find it useful to use them together? Is it that hetzner and digitalocean TF providers do a good job but provide limited functionality, and ansible fills in the gaps for you?

I don't think they are competitor, and if someone uses Ansible for infra I think they are using the wrong tool (mind you, last time I checked Ansibles's infra tooling few years back it wasn't adequate in my opinion).

I use Terraform to spin up the infra (vm, storage, firewalls, load balancers, DNS, etc) that the cloud services offer. Then when the VM is up I either run Ansible via local-exec Terraform provisioner, or after the fact via separate invocations.

I use Ansible to install, configure and deploy software on Linux VMs exclusively. For client projects, or those that need fast scalability on-demand, I will also use Packer+Ansible to build preconfigured VM images which I can then spin up via Terraform separately.

Hetzner and DigitalOcean providers are first party (partenered with HashiCorp) so you have assurance that what's in the docs works. This is true for most mid/large cloud providers.

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

#788

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#789

Post by korsarrrrr »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #16
triyambakam wrote: post #2

So if I want to migrate off of netlify to something better, where?

I use BunnyCDN to host several sites, they have a minimum cost of $1 per month and I usually pay $1 per month. I run my sites [0] on Hugo and copy the generated sites (Makefile) to BunnyCDN with their command line tool. It's a plain CDN, but does include DNS hosting for easy SSL certificates and has scriptable DNS [1] where you can run Javascript for dynamic DNS. I went with them b/c they are in the EU, but I've stay…

I switched from Bunny to BlazingCDN, with same performance... 1000TB - $0.0025 per Gb And the support helps a lot, they even made the config for Asia for free

https://blazingcdn.com/pricing/

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

#790

Post by conductr »

albert180 wrote: post #726
conductr wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Physical Boxes at Hetzner and the likes are usually way cheaper than most cloud offerings

Cloud is somewhat managed though so charging a premium makes some sense. The blank check factor of how they price their services is a major risk IMO. Also a turn off how every single bit of functionality becomes productized with its own pricing model.
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