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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

#791

Post by w0m »

bradly wrote: post #698
kej wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I really like about Nearly Free Speech.net. Their model is that you deposit funds up front, and they will deduct from those funds as you use services. It helps that they actually are nearly free so that a single $20 deposit can last for months or years in many cases. It's bizarre to me that more services don't support billing this way, since there are tons of situations where I would much rather hav…

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.

> Have a messed up my autopay

I stopped ~all autopays when (Boost Mobile?) deduced 200 instead of 20usd from my debit account one month in college. They refunded the difference relatively quickly, but I racked up 5 or 6 overcharge fees before realizing; ended up being a pita for an already broke 18 y/o to figure out.

I was a broke and stupid kid. Never use a debit as an autopay. But since then I like to track where each penny goes as it goes.

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

#792

Post by antisthenes »

mr337 wrote: post #565
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. On…

Sounds like some kind of corruption scheme or a very isolated case.

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

#793

Post by jari_mustonen »

listenallyall wrote: post #736
jari_mustonen wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

That does not help when we are evaluating and build the solution. We will proceed with this one.

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

#794

Post by amerkhalid »

jefozabuss wrote: post #136
ji_zai wrote: post #74

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere. Just went through Vercel's docs: --- "Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically miti…

If you want to sleep tight just get a dedicated server or VPS from something like Hetzner and/or combine with CDN providers like BunnyCDN - set up alerts just in case though. It takes more time and resources to manage it but you could save a lot on it in this case.

> It takes more time and resources to manage it

For most of the new web projects, setting up your brand new server is pretty well documented process and should not take more than couple of hours.

It get complicated when you grow and add more servers or components. But at that point, you should be able to afford a part-time consultant to handle complicated tasks or just use Cloud then.

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

#795

Post by sph »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #727
sph wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0. Makes it hard to move to any other platform. As a small tech shop, this is my Hotel California I'm happy to never leave. Yeah that's how Cloudflare can reach total control over the Internet. With thunderous applause by people that should know better. I know that my position is outright blasphemous in this day and age, where even self-…

I don't understand this take. First of all, moving off of Cloudflare is trivial if you really have an alternative. Second of all, self hosting a static website is easy, but that's not we're talking about here. We're talking about DDoS mitigation, which is not gonna be solved over a weekend hack with a load balancer. At least, not at the scale that matters. What would the Cloudflare going evil phase even look like? Is…

You mean that all the people on HN that use Cloudflare's very generous free tier are at risk of DDOS?

Of course there is a benefit to selling your soul to the devil, what's the bloody point otherwise? I do not need to hear all the good things the devil got you, I am telling you that it is silly that "go Cloudflare" is the default advice is any situation because we have become lazy and complacent and we do not really care that we give the keys to the internet to one company.

The Internet gets shittier because people are lazy, and I need better arguments to being complicit to this than "I need DDoS protection for my 100-visitor a month blog."

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

#796

Post by xescure »

baq wrote: post #170
notimetorelax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it is, I remember cases where telcos were prevented from charging thousands for roaming expenses because they were not licensed to make large loans.

Oh God roaming is one my biggest nightmares and it’s the worst UX to not get charged, too. ‘You want to go on vacation? Make sure to hunt down an option hidden 3 levels deep and enabled by default because we really like money and you didn’t read the fine print? Too bad, we really like money’

Thank you EU for regulating roaming! I remember being afraid to turn on data because the law was so new. At the end of the month the bill came and I was relieved to see 0€ extra for 7GB of traffic.

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

#797

Post by majani »

nindalf wrote: post #44

Since the author has gone viral I expect some netlify exec is going to take over and write this bill off to $0. In the words of Kramer “these big companies, they just write it off!” A moment of silence for the people who got DDoS-ed, didn’t go viral and still had to pay $5k.

If you bend over and pay in such circumstances, you are part of the problem. Twilio tried to pull this crap on me and I simply created another account with an email forwarder and left them holding the bag on the previous account

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

#798

Post by c120 »

noir_lord wrote: post #378
bobfunk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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,…

Yes, any price that's not hard capped is unacceptable. One reason why I quit Amazon cloud after the trial year. No because they were too expensive, but there was no way to guarantee they wouldn't charge me more than planned...

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

#799

Post by c120 »

nick238 wrote: post #731
pierat wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS doesn't have to check that for every request. They only have to eat the cost if you go over and use more before they shut you down. And the shut down should be in a way that they switch data to read only and give you a day to react before they delete.

They might even offer this as an insurance, so you pay a little more but can be sure you stay in budget.

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