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A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
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Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!
FastMail is so much better than GMail. I don't know why I didn't change earlier.
Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either.
It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscriptions every so often. Eventually gmail will receive no more mail I care about and I will remove the forwarding altogether. Its getting there!
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#83The detail that amazed me is the lack of visibility of the issue in reporting tools - it's all very well changing the terms, but not giving your customer any ability to see what is increasing the bill seems massively unfair.
Exactly the reason why I decided not to pay for Firebase and instead went with gradually rolling my own solutions.
Their Realtime Database is extremely convenient and pretty useful for web apps, but there's no way to limit the connections and track bandwidth usage in real time. It's basically an open door for anyone with only your Security Rules to block data access. There's no logs to even see if your rules are working as expected, nor where your connections are coming from. They didn't even have that simple blue line showing basic usage in OP's post until recently. The profiling tool mentioned in the OP is also recent and doesn't give a proper picture.
It's just really pathetic. They sell themselves as a service company for startups, but one of the biggest things startups need to do is manage their costs, which Firebase doesn't provide in any form. And now since Google bought them, their support will be near non-existent as with all Google products.
Having said all that, their Free tier is great for live prototypes and doesn't require adding payment information. Just make sure you're not tying yourself in if you want to progress. Make thin wrappers around their libraries and export your data regularly if it's not throwaway.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#84Reminds me of getting Bait-and-Switch'd by Google App Engine in 2011. From 10's of euros to 1000's. > They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options. Sounds like Google did a great job with Firebase. Definitely gives you that Google-feel of unresponsi…
> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.
> It really is appalling
Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences, but those were exceptions, not the rule.
I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'cloud compute' and their 'sql cloud' offering last year. It was a performance disaster; queries that were minor .1ms on localhost or in the same network were suddenly 18-20ms hitting google cloud. Spent a few days trying to dig in, and a few responses from various groups were "shouldn't be that slow" and "works for me" and that was about it. Gave up trying to get any real response from google (we may have got a 'looking in to it' response - I don't remember).
Thing was, I knew going in it wasn't going to end well, I just wasn't sure exactly why (maybe that's just too cynical of a view, but I prefer 'realistic').
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#85Is there any open source product that offers everything that firebase does?
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#86Shame on them for not giving notice and a proper explanation of the change. They were vastly under reporting the cost of providing the service. Consider that they are a business. Shame on you for not using resumable TLS sessions/Keep alive. You're hammering their infrastructure. The change in how they meter usage is seeing you having to compensate them for the resource they provide you.
Be very careful here. The developer may not have used TLS BUT any failed authorisation attempts are also counted in the bandwidth.
So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the Amazon guys will leave money on the table What? they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit, there's lot of thought that goes into their pricing and you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money.
„...you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money...“ Is exactly what the parent comment said...
What trust does that earn exactly? It's a strategy, not some noble cause.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#88"This includes failed attempts which are blocked by their security rules." Ouch!
> Ouch! Yeah, no kidding. It means someone nefarious (or bored) can easily run up a huge bill by just directing a ton of invalid requests to their API. Many inexpensive hosting providers provide you with a lot of bandwidth (e.g. Scaleway offers unlimited bandwidth at ~200MBit/s). Assuming you can saturate the link, that's around 64TB per month of traffic. Quite the Firebase bill they'd have.
well it's not like anybody has the business model of doing denial of service attacks that stop when the ransom is paid, because if someone did have that business model this seems like a great way to make sure people will pay you. I mean just do like enough to cost $500 and say pay me $1000 today or you will pay google $10000 tomorrow.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's getting to that point for me too now. I'm really really close to removing them from every aspect of my life. Professional and private.
Gmail still rocks
I pay for G Suite and basically the only thing anyone uses is Gmail. I don't have hard proof but I feel that all of my emails from my domain never go to spam. I one time had to use Godaddy's email system and ALL emails went to people's spam folder. It is like Google makes you pay for email or your emails won't get delivered properly. Maybe it was Godaddy's mail system's IP that was blacklisted but I think you have to pay to play these days.
Re: A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
„...you can be sure that your opinion and trust is an outcome of their strategy to make more money...“ Is exactly what the parent comment said...
What trust does that earn exactly? It's a strategy, not some noble cause.
Trust that you won't be ~extorted~ bait and switched in the future?