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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

#801

Post by bsder »

INTPenis wrote: post #212
jpalomaki wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing ”devil’s” advocate: tracking spend in real-time is not trivial. It adds complexity to stack. Bugs in the feature can cause sites to go down (for long time) without a reason. Larger online businesses likely rather sort out the problems later than risk shutting down in the middle of unexpected success. (But I also would like to see this feature)

Not really. AWS has budget alerts right? And I can read those budget alerts through their API. So it would be trivial for me to poll their budget API for an alert, and immediatly trigger a shutdown of my Cloudfront service. Why can't they do that for me?

> AWS has budget alerts right?

Nope. Not in real time, they don't.

You can significantly overspend before the warning comes in.

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

#802

Post by jonathanyc »

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 users on the Pro plan for a few years now. Moving from Netlify to CloudFlare after this; “this didn’t come through in the initial support reply” doesn’t cut it for a $100k bill.

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

#803

Post by chrisoverzero »

dns_snek wrote: post #745
nemothekid wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I don't think you understand what a hard limit is. When I set a hard limit, that means that under no circumstance s…

> If you set your hard limit to $20, then Amazon should refuse to create more than 50 secrets. That's a safe behavior which limits your spend to at most $20.

I have 100 secrets and no hard limit. Now I set the hard limit to $20. What does AWS do?

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

#804

Post by croemer »

brnt wrote: post #777
croemer wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partially agree, yes the liability is independent of the payment. But in practice the one who has the money has the benefit of the status quo. The other party without money has to actively take legal action which is costly enough that it's often not pursued.

That again depends on jurisdiction. In much of the EU, this is not expensive and a thriving industry exists to support businesses to get bills paid.

Yes and no, collection costs significant proportions of the outstanding debt, and if you object to the collection of the debt saying it's not justified the business ultimately has to sue. Collector can't do everything.

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

#805

Post by krick »

frontalier wrote: post #601
Izkata wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"static site" doesn't necessarily mean "small". It would be easy to go way over 1Mb with a couple of pictures.

at 60MB it is still one million downloads

I'm not trying to justify netlify, because it's pretty obvious all cloud providers have vile intentions here (even though they pretend otherwise): it's obvious that total majority of use cases for such platforms are toy or small-scale projects, and literally everyone in this market would prefer their website being shut down, rather than getting $100K (or even $5K) bill, BUT…

1 million downloads (= visits) is nothing for "going viral overnight"

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

#806

Post by remram »

bradly wrote: post #752
remram wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In New York, I pay $26 for T-Mobile, one of the most mainstream carriers.

Weird. The cheapest T-Mobile non-prepaid plan I see is $50 + taxes and fees, and that is without watch service. The cheapest T-Mobile prepaid I see is $30 + taxes and fees, and that also is without a watch. I pay $20 for the phone plan, and $10 for the watch add-on. No fees or taxes Feels reasonable to me.

What's a watch add-on?

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

#807

Post by remram »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #770
remram wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you pay based on your actual usage The disagreement is on what "usage" means. I wouldn't assume that "usage" includes things that don't take any action on my part. If I don't use my phone, for example, I wouldn't get any "usage". A phone pay-as-you-go plan would probably trigger similar outrage if they charged you potentially unlimited amounts for phone calls that hit your voicemail overnight.

Do you know how web hosting works? You pay for a service so other people can use it. Extending the phone analogy, it is like you set up a public phone that anyone can use, and you pay for every time someone uses it.

Your analogy break down because no part of buying and setting up a phone yourself is free. If some company offers to set up a public phone "for free" in your neighborhood, and charge you for "usage", you wouldn't expect to be charged if you don't place calls.

The "do you know how it works" is completely unnecessary and rude.

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

#808

Post by joshjob42 »

Gormo wrote: post #644
raiyu wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. And typically speaking a $104k…

> What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. Sort of, but the approach to the approach isn't great. If you're going to void charges from DDOS traffic anyway, you might as well make that explicit policy, rather than doing it after the fact in a way that seems discretionary. The Reddit thread is full of people who are saying that they intend to pull their static content off of Netlify and…

Just deleted my tiny personal site, and will reinstate it at Cloudflare Pages. Thanks for the tip!

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

#809

Post by BrujahRage »

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.

But you do see how _not_ addressing this in the initial support reply is going to cost you all in the long term, right? The real lesson here seems to be for small projects, it may well be worth the investment to handle my own hosting. All I see here is that getting you to do the right thing required publicly shaming you, which means you can be trusted about as far as I can throw a piano.

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

#810

Post by joshjob42 »

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'm moving my domain name and personal site off Netlify (already deleted the sites, DNS transfer requested), probably moving to Cloudflare pages.

It may only move a few MB a month, but I just can't risk if I put anything more substantial there that I might get hit with a bill for $100k and you maybe will forgive it. And that this has apparently been policy for nearly a decade makes it even worse.

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