Reminds 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 unresponsive support and no hope when you have problems with any of their services. I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. (Edit: Yep, they recommend Stack Overflow, Quora, and then their Google Group.. lol. Some things never change)
I learnt this lesson the hard way. Solution: get a separate debit (not credit!) card for all cloud stuff. Make sure you only transfer enough money on to it each month to cover what you reasonably expect your bills to be (and that you can quickly top it up in hours if you legitimately need to).
Worst case, if AWS or Google decide to fuck you over, let the bill bounce. This way you've still got funds on hand to deal with the fall out and some leverage to negotiate a solution.
Of course, this approach only works if you're happy to have your service cut off more or less abruptly if your card bounces, something the author of the article explicitly mentions isn't an option.
The problem (in the article at least) isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.
They won't cut you off immediately and the gain you get is some breathing space/wriggle room to decide what your next step is going to be once you've been landed with a huge, unexpected bill.
Also, nothing gets them talking to you faster than a bounced invoice :)
Perhaps. Or perhaps they block or throttle your account. Stopping payment is the nuclear option, you can't expect any cooperation with outstanding payments on your account (not that you necessarily can with a fully paid up account), and your position, if you should choose to pursue legal action, just got a lot more complicated.
To be clear, the only time any of this matters is when a huge, unexpected bill arrives. Day to day, you should anticipate any big, legitimate bills and make sure funds are there to settle them (or you scale back usage to avoid getting smacked).
It's when a big bill lands in error or is introduced sneakily that having a separate "cloud only card" can save you. In that case, it's the supplier that's gone nuclear and you're just responding in kind.
Sure, but that's just not what we're discussing here. The author of the original article clearly authorised the increased spend (but obviously not the sudden change causing it), and could have declined (presumably at the cost of having his app throttled or shut down). Nothing about a "cloud only card" would have changed his situation the least.
Totally agree. If he/she authorised it after being given an opportunity to decline then, yes, it's absolutely on them. /me clearly didn't read the article ;)
I've had an invoiced account with AWS since 2007. We have been 9 months behind on payments at times and they have never suspended the account. Keep a line open with then and they will be reasonable. We are currently current with then but have been behind for more that 2/3 the history of the account.
> The problem [...] isn't being surreptitiously billed a large amount, it is cost of a critical service changing dramatically without warning.
Sorry, but this is the risk of using somebody else's service -- especially
Google's -- as a critical component of a business. It may be marvellous for
developers not to bother with infrastructure for their own service, but this
strategy likes to come back and bite in the ass.
You always have to use someone else's service - even if it's just the electricty supply. But different services come with different risks, and you have to try to gauge them.
No, this is the risk of using somebody else's service without getting your rates locked in with a contract. You know, a Service Level Agreement? Those things companies used to sign with their hosting providers, before all this IaaS stuff made developers feel like they could "start using now, talk to legal later"?
In Sweden we have at least one bank that has e-cards where you can set up a new card for each transaction. You decide how long it is valid in months and for how much total and recieve a unique card number and ccv. I have been using this at least 15 years for payments online. You set it up, make the payment and then immediately close the card again if you want to be extra safe.
Unfortunately my bank (Nordea) removed this excellent feature and instead refer to having Visa 3D Secure verification, which basically only works in Sweden and is voluntary for the entity charging the credit card. Now I have to pay for two cards just to be able to do this.
Or at least they used to. I used to use it all the time on my Bank of America credit card but haven't used it in a few years. I just tried to use it last week and it seems like the option has disappeared. Maybe it's just bad web design, but I can't find it anywhere now.
I agree, let the providers take the risk. Typically, the providers will let it bounce a few times before cutting things off as well. This might just give you another week or two to sort things out, without having to lay out possibly significant funds that you may or may not be able to reclaim.
I only wish setting up virtual cards were as easy as setting up a new mail box. I know there are services out there that lets you do this, but I've yet to find one that works globally and is easy to work with.
To be honest, this all sounds like it should be a primary bank feature. I should be able to cap a recurring payment at $X for a specific vendor otherwise have it go through automatically.
My personal bank sort of gives me that with their fraud protection. If a one off huge charge appears from a company that regularly bills me (but at much smaller amounts), their fraud system sends a text asking if I want to authorise or block the charge.
The second bank account is really more for protecting you against black swan events. If all your accounts are under the same bank and have the same owner, there's nothing stopping the bank taking funds from one of your accounts to make up for shortfalls in another.
CaptialOne does this pretty well. So far it is the only bank I have come across would alert me they are blocking the transaction for a few days so I have a chance to review and if I don't they will release the block. Every 6 months or so they have someone called me up to verify recent transactions.
Hell, their mobile app alerts me the moment a recurring charge posts for a different amount than normal, if I put my NYT delivery on hold for travel or something I can guarantee the next two months I'll get an alert to review the transaction (though they don't outright block it)
I know that bank of america offers this feature on all its personal credit cards. You can create a temporary card number (and related info) as well as how much can be charged in a given month and how many months the card number should be active for.
The only reason I don't use them for everything is because I get better cashback/points with other cards.
This works well in India, with 2-factor auth — Indian companies can't charge my debit or credit card just because they have the card number, expiry and CVV. I have to approve each transaction with my bank.
I'm wary of giving my card information to companies outside India because I don't have this protection.
>Indian companies can't charge my debit or credit card just because they have the card number, expiry and CVV. I have to approve each transaction with my bank.
True for Indian companies but what if you get charged via Forex abroad? For me - Google or Steam - don't required 2FA. All I have to do is to enter my number, confirm CVV then zap. It gets debited. I do get a call from my bank (HDFC) asking if this transaction has been initiated by me, if I say yes, they let go.
My bank (in Sweden) lets me generate virtual debit card numbers with a specified cost cap and expiration date. It's some ancient-looking Flash widget though so I suspect it's a legacy feature...
That South African hackable (in the good sense of the word) bank that's been making the rounds on HN might be able to do this. (I forget the name of the bank.)
Well, that's pretty much what a virtual card is – you transfer funds to it like you would with any other bank account, and it's not in your bank. It'll be a debit card with no overdraft, so any charges over what is in the account will be denied. This won't fly with places that require a credit card, like car rental agencies for instance, but that's a non issue in this case obviously.
Definitely use a different bank. A friend had a separate checking account for their PayPal purchases. And when PayPal clawed back some money (as they are wont to do), the bank manager helpfully transferred money into the account to avoid an overdraft charge.
Looks great, but like many other services like it, it's US only[1]:
> Is Emburse available outside of the U.S.?
> Only companies incorporated within the U.S. may register for an Emburse account. In addition, the primary account owner must be a resident of the United States with a Social Security number and a verifiable physical U.S. street address (no P.O. Boxes). We do not offer Emburse accounts to residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and other U.S. territories.
This is excellent advice. In general, I've personally imported lessons about accounting controls I learned running a company to personal finance. Yes, it is a pain.
But Paypal, for instance, can only empty a bank account that is used for nothing else, any service like this (open-ended liabilities with shitty/no support) is isolated to debit cards, etc. Nobody gets permission to charge open-ended amounts to credit cards, and nobody gets automation rights to the "real" bank accounts, period.
There's a business model here somewhere for someone to automate all of this. It involves substantially more time to keep organized than my prior two-banks/two-credit cards model. Personal finance apps just aren't designed to treat, for instance, debit cards as transient.
As others note, sure, services that do something like this can still come after you. But who has the money in their pocket right now matters a lot when resolving disputes like this.
Or the bank can just automatically give you an overdraft for that amount, add some fees because you accessed that facility, and require you to pay the full amount.
After all, they're just being helpful in managing your money and paying your suppliers.
Now in the USA as of 2012, banks cannot turn on overdraft protection on a debit card unless the customer requests. Prior to this they were taking your day's debits and applying the largest one first. So suppose you bought lunch for $10 and a coffee for $3 then your cable company later in the day billed you for an amount in excess of your account. They would then apply the cable company bill first, then the 2 smaller charges to maximize overdraft fees and hit you with 3 $30 charges.
The order wouldn't matter in that case, would it? Either way it's still deducting the sum of those three transactions at the end of the day.
I thought what they were doing is applying all your debits, charging you if that puts you into overdraft, and then applying any credits. If they applied the credits first, you wouldn't go below zero.
The order still matters. If you have $20 in your account and get hit with three debits for $6, $10, and then $30, processing them in order means the $6 and $10 debits go through, leaving you with $4 in the bank, then the $30 debit causes an overdraft and a single fee. Comparatively, processing the $30 debit first immediately causes an overdraft, and the $10 and $6 debits cause two more overdrafts for three total fees.
Either way, you're trying to charge $46 against an account with $20, but one method results in 1 fee and one method results in 3 fees. The issue of credits vs debits you mentioned can compound this issue.
I had this happen to me in real life, back as a broke college student. The difference is the number of transactions you get hit with the overdraft fee for.
Consider a bank account with $20 in it, the day before payday, when you forget your World of Warcraft subscription hits today instead of tomorrow. That's $15. But you buy:
If the transactions happened in-order, the subscription causes the overdraft, and you're charged $25 or whatever (yeah they are very high). But in the way banks used to do it, they'd take your total ledger for the day, and order it by highest $ first. So, subscription first, $5 left. Lunch, $0 left. Coffee, dinner, and snack are three transactions when overdrawn, so that's $25 * 3 = $75 in fees instead.
Banks claimed that this process was because you'd probably want your highest-amounts paid first, as it'd be something like rent money. In the end, it means way more fees for them, though.
$75 in fees is especially brutal when you don't have much money in the first place; it pretty much caused me to not be able to even go to 7-11 for a candy bar for two months.
Yes, you can. The last few banks accounts I've created have all asked if I wanted overdraft protection. You say "NO! decline ANY transaction that would cause an overdraft"
But they seem to be able to delay debits for several days, perhaps a week? At least on WellsFargo. Isn't this a backdoor/loophole to get around the no overdraft issue?
This is why no reasonable person should use debit cards for recurring payments.
I'd advise not using debit cards for anything, under any circumstances, and relying on the better protections that credit cards provide, but it's a losing battle. My debit card is ATM-only.
You're right and the trick is setting up a separate account for the debit card (ideally with a different bank).
This is generally a good approach for all sorts of reasons, not just protection from over enthusiastic cloud bills.
Keep most of your funds in one bank (and never use the cards). Transfer from this account to one or more other accounts with other banks and use the cards on these secondary accounts to pay for things. This way you're protected from suppliers over billing and banks going crazy with unarranged overdrafts (which aren't secured so absolute worst case you just tell them to fuck off and default on it).
Basically, the trick is holding on to your cash. Much harder to fix things rapidly if you're having to negotiate with a third party between you and the supplier (which is the case with a credit card company).
Google stopped accepting my Debit card a year ago! Even after 14 months of calls / emails the issue is still here. I don't have other options rather than throw Google Cloud to the garbage bin (where actually it live).
Interesting! For AWS, DO, Linode etc, I use a debit card with no problem.
Edit: just remembered we're using Google's Cloud Vision API and that's billed to the same debit card. So, for UK accounts at least, they take debit cards.
Maybe it's a regional thing? Most banks here (Ireland) issue debit cards by default and most people don't go out of their way to get a credit card, so they'd be cutting off a large chunk of their customer base by banning debit cards.
Are your debit cards really just debit cards (i.e. bank-specific "ATM" or "client" cards), or do they work using credit-card payments infrastructure? If you plugged your Irish bank debit card number into e.g. Stripe as a credit card number, would it take it?
For Google Cloud can't you set a billing limit for it to not exceed? That's what I have done but I have not come close to exceeeding it yet so IDK if there is something I am missing.
You can. Beware though! It can take 24 hours to increase the limit - horrible if you get a sudden spike in traffic from, say, a techcrunch post or something.
Should be fine I think providing there are no circumstances where Google can decide to ignore the limit (don't have much experience with their cloud stuff).
Ahh I think you are right. Just checked and you can set limits for App engine, but there are budgets in Google Cloud which is confusing and doesn't seem like it actually limits anything, it just keeps you notified of how much you are spending relative to your budget
I just started using privacy.com and so far it has been an excellent experience. They provide everything my previous VAN-providing CC company did, and more. The one and only downside is that at present, the VAN uses ACH debit to draw immediately any funds used; there's no credit as such (although they are looking into that).
EDIT: I have no affiliation with privacy.com; I'm just a satisfied user.
> 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.
I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human customer service agent can respond.
So naive. That's not how you get support in this day and age. You get support by kicking up a storm on social media.
Shout far and wide (twitter, facebook, reddit, etc) that [Big corporation] is screwing you. If you can give it some sort of spin - like racism or gender equality - all the better. Just kick up as much of a storm as you can.
I guarantee that [Big corporation] will be forced to respond.
(I say this semi-jokingly, but it is sad that this a) works, and b) that sometimes it is the only way to get their attention)
I don't know if Firebase has a reseller program, but for other cloud offers from Google, my advice is: if you want someone you can scream at, buy from a reseller instead of buying directly from Google.
Last week at thegoodfellas.com.br a disgruntled ex-employee managed to erase all their Gmail accounts and change the administrator account in order to prevent recovery. You can recover a deleted account in 5 days, but you need access to that administrator account. Unfortunately they could not recover access to the administrator account in time and lost all their G Suite data - you may blame them for their flawed firing process but shit happens and when it does a reseller can be fast enough to prevent a tragedy.
I administer a couple G Suite accounts for small business owner friends purchased direct from Google.
G Suite has incredible phone support. I've called 3-4 times over past 5 years and never waited more than 30 seconds to talk to a knowledgeable and capable tech who resolved the issue immediately. No BS troubleshooting steps, just straight to the heart of the issue.
I recall a couple Irish guys, one Eastern European and one Indian, but none with too-strong to parse accents (these were their locations -- relevant to make the point that Google clearly does have multiple live phone support centers around the world). All fully willing and capable of resolving the issue without passing me around. These weren't incredibly complex issues, but at least a couple were glitches requiring fixes on the backend (vs. mistakes on my part).
Has anyone with a G Suite account and a Cloud account ever tried contacting G Suite Support for the cloud side? Might be worth a try -- they've been helpful for me in one case where the issue wasn't strictly related to G Suite.
G Suite support from Google improved a lot, but for good reasons it is not easy to recover access to an administrator account that was modified to prevent recovery. In a case like this, how support personel can tell a legitimate customer from someone trying to gain access through social engineering?
A local reseller can pay you a visit and verify the situation but hands are tied for the friendly Kumar sitting at a helpdesk facility in India.
Here in Brazil it is even harder, because most customers are unable to communicate well in English and support in Portuguese is not done by native speakers.
> In a case like this, how support personel can tell a legitimate customer from someone trying to gain access through social engineering?
Pretty simple: opt-in KYC. Give people the option to email/fax you their passport or birth certificate or whatever, at any time after they set up their account but before the account is compromised. Extract the relevant ID numbers from the images; then store those numbers, encrypted, the same way you'd store "password recovery" info.
If the account is later compromised on their end, just ask the person attempting to do the recovery to send through the same stuff again, and compare with your recovery fields.
It's essentially the pseudo-biometric, pseudo-"something you have" equivalent of a Secret Question.
GCP sells support as a separate product. If you're a hobbyist, then that's great, as you can keep your costs lower.
If you're a business, there's no excuse not to pay Google for support. It's $150/mo; significantly higher than the $25/mo infrastructure bill the OP was discussing, but not unreasonable if you want to have a chance of guaranteeing QoS to your customers.
There NOT getting a pass ... I don't know anyone who is willing to bet their business on Google Cloud, but plenty who will do so with AWS and Azure. Google needs to replace whoever is running this section of the business with someone who can emulate what Amazon & Microsoft are doing.
Is it because so many of Google's customers would then feel obligated to also offer support or service? While it's easy to pike at Google as a huge company which should provide this level of service, where do you draw the line? As I look across the collection of services I pay for, I don't see many of them with much more than "contact us" forms on sites, and in-app, no way to contact them at all.
Is there a certain size of vendor or price point where we expect to have human support and an SLA for response?
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').
I don't think it's fair you're being down voted, I get your point of view, so I gave you an upvote. But the thing is, this isn't some kid-in-a-basement free-but-ad-supported service where you-get-what-you-pay-for. Google's cloud offering isn't free (for any use beyond hello world anyway) and as a paying customer I'd expect:
1. Things to work
2. People to answer when things don't work
3. Things to start working again in a timely manner, with timely and concise updates along the way
Points two and three carry a lot of nuance, but Google's support does not. It's a virtual wall that people cry to and get no response back from, except for the rare few occasions when the Google deities decide to grace forums or mailing lists with their presence. It's just not a serious offering.
Now, you can pay extra for support, but even so it's going to be appalling. You probably will get to talk to someone at least, but in my experience you rarely get ahold of anyone who'll actually read what you've sent them, much less actually try to help.
My take away is that support and customer service is just not a priority for Google, what so ever. It's not even a low priority thing, it's a no priority thing.
It's appalling because you're a paying customer. I can understand free services not having support, but any service that's costing money should at the very least have a human being responding through email.
I believe that the standard approach for getting support from google is to hire an ex-googler who has good relationships with relevant people still at the company. It's ludicrous, but I've seen it work.
a) hundreds and thousands of horror stories from people saying "I did not get any support from google". You can counter that with "here are people who did get support", but the existence of the thousands of support nightmare stories out there gives you enough evidence to know that this isn't really "supported" in the way you might expect.
b) there are no phone numbers.
https://firebase.google.com/support/ - no phone numbers. That's, of course, not the sole criteria you should use to judge potential support, but... it's google.
It's 2017. We have multiple years of knowing what Google's track record is re: support for paying customers. Outside of large adwords advertisers (where they make a lot of money), it's non-existent from a practical standpoint.
The big problem here is that firebase was fine until google acquired them.
I'm reminded of a time when I had a bad experience at a restaurant. Local place I went to with friends from work. We went... probably 4-5 times per year, and I loved the chicken sandwich they did. Last time I went, it was ... bad. Not what I'd expected at all. It was different.
Server asks "how's everything?". I said I was disappointed that the chicken sandwich had changed - it was not as good as before. Now... I wasn't actually complaining as in "comp the meal", but I was not a satisfied diner.
"Nothing's changed sir".
"um... yeah - this is nowhere near as good as it used to be".
"You're wrong, nothing's changed".
We had a back and forth, and they went back and came out "the cooks say the recipe is exactly the same".
This was getting a bit ridiculous. Manager came over, same exchange. He leaves, the comes back and says "they're right - the recipe is 100% the same. We have changed a few ingredients last month, but it's the same".
Maybe that doesn't actually relate to the google service situation at all now, come to think of it, but I was reminded of that situation when I started typing it :)
Oh yeah - nothing changed from OP's end, except how the new owner (google) decided to start monitoring and accounting for usage. Think of a "$9.99 all you can eat buffet" getting loyal diners, then changing owners, and the new owners giving some people a $95 bill at the end of the meal because they'd decided to also charge for any visits to the salad bar over 2. Most diners would never hit that limit, but a few - loyal diners for years - would have been (rightly) upset at the after-the-fact change.
I know this but to say everyone does or should isn't exactly fair. As well, you assume I am holding the purse strings, that I'm in any way responsible or even have a say in procurement. This may be true in my own business (it is) but not necessarily elsewhere, like my clients (it more often than not isn't) and you'll just have to live with poor decisions made on your behalf.
Also quite often, there's a sunk cost that makes switching that much harder. So no, it's not fair to say "Google has shitty support but that's ok because we all kind of know this." Paying customers can and should complain about this, loudly, shouting it from the roof tops. Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases.
Some semblance of professionalism shouldn't be too much to ask from one of the world's biggest corporations, an ask coming from paying customers no less.
"Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases."
That's the ONLY thing that will ever make this change, but it rarely happens because "sunk cost" rationalizations (and "maybe it'll get better next year!").
Shouting from the rooftops for years has not worked. This is not anywhere near a 'new' problem.
Yes, possibly some people don't know it, and yeah, I totally get that "you'll just have to live with poor decisions made on your behalf.".
I live with poor decisions all the time (mine and others'). But the notion that we can bitch about it on forums, or make 'formal' requests for better support - none of that makes a lick of difference to them (or, demonstrably hasn't for several years). It's "google", so some people will flock to it because of the brand, or because it's not azure, or aws, or whatever. Or to tick the 'cloud' box on their spreadsheet. Or because google gave them thousands in free credits to switch.
"Some semblance of professionalism shouldn't be too much to ask from one of the world's biggest corporations, an ask coming from paying customers no less."
But... it demonstrably is, and has been.
And... you'll get a client who will say "I can't believe this, email someone, get this fixed". At some point you have to push back and say "no, this is simply not fixable, you have to live with XYZ, or pay the cost of moving somewhere else".
An extremely large customer, maybe, possibly, might have a bit of say, perhaps. But even if you're dropping millions with them... for a company that measures revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars per day, you probably won't hold much sway. If you had that sort of budget to spend, and it was that critical, you'd likely be doing enough due diligence that research in to actual support/service levels (vs what the sales contact tells you) would be on the agenda.
Vote with the wallet is the only viable/impactful approach, and people have to be willing to forgo the sunk costs.
And for people that don't know up front - they always had the opportunity to search (google) beforehand. If they choose not to - caveat emptor.
10 years ago, we could possibly be forgiven for choosing google's services (GAE, etc) because there wasn't as much of a track record to look at re: support, etc. There's no good excuse for starting a project today on google compute and claiming ignorance of their support levels.
Ok, I've missed your point now – what are you actually trying to say? That Google being unprofessional and delivering on the whole sub-par services is OK because a lot (but not all) people already know this, and so really paying customers should just suck it up or go elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they even can in the first place?
If I've misrepresented what you're trying to say here please do correct me, because I clearly don't get it. If I haven't, I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree – I think customers should shout from the rooftops till they're blue if they want to, even if it seems to lead nowhere.
But to avoid it, you generally do research ahead of time. And/or be willing to actually walk away from your 'investment' on their platform and start again somewhere else.
In the OP case, they didn't sign up with google in the first place. It's doubly shitty for them, because they didn't ask for this, and could not have known in advance that google would end up being the support provider. Similar to when I refinanced a house, and 6 month later, my 'servicer' sold my loan to someone else with much crappier service (charge me $3/month to take an electronic payment from me? I wouldn't have chosen this as a service option).
Yes, paying customers should go elsewhere. Complaining about it to google directly and indirectly for a decade has not noticeable improved their support for their cloud offerings.
Suck it up or go elsewhere. You can keep registering complaints with them, or organize digital protests, or whatever, but to get better service, you will likely have to go somewhere else.
"I think customers should shout from the rooftops till they're blue if they want to, even if it seems to lead nowhere". Of course they can. They just need to realize it will not change the quality of support. Someone earlier (you?) said to 'vote with your wallet'. Shouting from the digital rooftops about how crappy service X is, but continuing to pay them, is a waste of time at best, and enabling at worst. Leaving for another service is voting with your wallet/budget, and it needs to happen.
Sure but voting with your wallet isn't, as mentioned previously, always an option for various reasons. Shouting from the roof tops is little recourse, I agree, but if nothing else it can be cathartic. I don't think that should be discouraged.
"as mentioned previously, always an option for various reasons. "
In the very short term, agreed - it doesn't do much good. But shouting from the rooftops internally (at client, management, stakeholders, etc) may do more good in the medium term.
So, you agree that Google's service is appalling, but claim that it is not appalling because the degree of appal has not changed over time? I cannot follow this logic.
Nothing you've said makes that any more acceptable. I don't care if we "know going in"; it's still unacceptable, and they should be investigated for it.
totally agreed that it wasn't google. people signed up for firebase and expected whatever level of service they had with firebase to continue. google acquiring them, then changing things for the worse for existing customers with little-to-no documentation/warning/etc - it's inexcusable. but people will stay with them because "we're already here", and they'll continue the abusive cycle for years.
And yes, on the comic - ok, not everyone "knows" everything up front. But... you have search engines (google, even!) to do actual research beforehand.
I see small business folks and small consultancies do far more research on comparing various $7/month hosting plans via hosting review sites than I see people researching their decisions to use AWS vs Google vs Azure.
I made it a point a long time ago to never use any SaaS, PaaS, or cloud solutions from Google for anything important. First off, their offerings tend to be much more expensive than competitors. Second, Google tends to randomly drop features, services, and support for applications without warning whenever they want. Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything. I use Linode for all of my hosting, and I can get tech support on the phone in less than 5 minutes even without the upgraded support plan. On top of this, Linode and DigitalOcean offer extensive community curated documentation for almost everything.
The above reasons are also why I don't use any open source software developed or maintained solely by Google. There's no guarantee that Google won't just stop maintaining it after a year or less. For a somewhat recent project, my co-founder and I evaluated using Angular2 for the front-end of our application. During our evaluation, we learned about Angular4. Knowing about what happened between Angular1 and Angular2, we decided to steer clear of the angular ecosystem. This decision also made more sense from the performance and ecosystem side of the argument. Most groups that develop open source software do their best to ensure that there is a well documented and simple upgrade path. Look at Django, rails, React, Vue, postgresql, etc for example. As far as I have experienced, Google products offer no such simple upgrade path.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what value Google is offering anymore. The only quality product from them I still find any use for is Gmail. Even Gmail has competitors that do Email better. I guess there's also youtube, but Google are kind of shitting that up as well.
I think the tech space needs to walk away from worshiping Google and Facebook. In all reality, the technical quality of their products is lacking and their entire goal is to lock both consumers and developers inside their own walled gardens.
I hear you. I've made an exception on angular2, partially because it's being baked in to some other tools I use, and I think those communities will help support it as well. And from what I can tell, the 'a2->a3->a4' is much more minor support numbering vs the "everything is redone" from a1->a2.
But this is a somewhat easier choice to make because I still have the code locally. Google could stop supporting it tomorrow, and it would not be fun, but things wouldn't stop working, unlike the firebase situation above, where the option is "turn off your app".
That said, I've generally been using knockout and vue (more vue recently than knockout) and both have been fine.
"Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything". There's a lot of people on this thread that feel like because they're paying for something they should get support. And... while I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint, and agree they should, we've had 10+ years of seeing google consistently under- or non- support many services that people seem to want to base their entire businesses on.
Just as a restaurant can be appalling from when it was first opened and even if you don't visit it ever, other services can. Appalling doesn't depend on personal experience or lack of prior knowledge.
is there a typo here? 18ms seems like soemthing that could be designed into their whole infrastructure for some reason you don't know about (such as partitioning of networks, whatever) -- after all, it's a cloud solution, right? Maybe 18 ms tacked onto every request is fine for them.
To be honest, if all of my Internet requests were 18 ms slower I wouldn't even notice.
if I read you correctly and it wasn't a typo, could you mention why you cared so much? The .1 ms you quoted on localhost is extraordinarily quick and I wouldn't expect it to translate to a cloud...
Because we had a shitty codebase that made 350 SQL calls on one page (the user dashboard), so the primary page that everyone used went from < 500ms to > 8 seconds, and the end client who had to test and accept this change didn't like it. It became unusable.
To (re?)clarify - this was 18ms per query to the SQL cloud (from a google compute engine).
Yes, were there things that could be done to reduce that? Of course. The other guy on the project put some caching in, reduced duplicate DB calls, etc, and got it down to around 3-4 seconds, but without severely diving in and learning far more about this inherited codebase, there wasn't much that could be done to make it much faster.
The other steps involved heavier caching, which changed the actual functionality of the service that was contracted before. "real time status updates" had a functional definition of being within X seconds, IIRC. Caching everything so 'new' information wasn't necessarily available to an end user for, say, 3 minutes, wasn't an option, without getting a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. Not saying it wouldn't work technically, but the client relationship was already strained.
The move to google was primarily to 'save money' (because someone had $10k service credit with google), but the effort to make it work well on google cloud and SQL combo (wasn't my call) was too much.
You can say this isn't google's fault entirely - you'd probably have a strong case - but not everyone is moving pristine clean/strong/good code over, and problems with the original base were amplified by seemingly small issues.
I hope you don't think I'm blaming your code base, but just out of pure curiosity, as an amateur question could you mention why the SQL calls couldn't be done in parallel -- did each one depend on the next or something?
At the high level I get everything you just said, just curious about this point, if you remember.
Yep. For me it was running instances that didn't respond to requests to delete or stop. They kept charging anyway.
Support was somebody in a different timezone who complained when I didn't answer my phone in the middle of the night. I quite liked the Google Cloud offering, but to get so burnt so quickly... stay away.
Sorry to hear about this. I work for our cloud platform support team ( we don't cover firebsse) and this is not the impression we want our customers to get.
We don't want to be calling customers in the middle of their night while they are sleeping. Its not an effective way to resolve issues. We need help identifying when we fall short so we can fix the issues.
Ways to let us know:
1) fill out the survey when your case is closed. We review every survey but less then 1% of cases get the survey filled out.
2) tweet your case id at us and it also goes through our review process
3) email me (tsg@Google.com) and I can correct the problems.
4) GCP slack community has a whole bunch of active Googlers (and the community will flag one us down) if you are having problems with the support team.
I did that. It took me two years to move everything over (email took the longest time), but it's been totally worth it. I still have my @gmail address, but it's only there to forward email to my real address, and I never log in or send email. Besides junk mail and spam, I am now at a point where I get maybe 1-2 real emails on my @gmail account, and then I tell the sender to use my new address.
My google usage is now
1. Occasionally watching Youtube videos in an incognito window
2. Very rarely using !g to search Google via DDG
3. Using Gmaps in an incognito window a couple times a month
and that's it. I don't find that I miss it at all. If I had to stop using Youtube and Gmaps, I won't miss 'em.
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.
Is there some criterion by which GoDaddy is not the worst service provider? Given their popularity with domain parkers and other less savory parts of the IT world, I would assume that the blame was entirely on their shoulders. That said, configuring an email server correctly seems to be rather an involved process[0] so we should perhaps not rule out some measure of incompetence as well as shadiness.
The reason we're all here, support. One of the reasons GoDaddy is a company I still use and have used for years is that they have 24/7 telephone support that's reasonably decent. I have called and gotten domain issues sorted by GoDaddy at 2 AM on a Sunday by a dude who didn't have a foreign accent.
I'm not a big account with them, surely trivial compared to those mass domain parkers you mention, but they've never made me feel like I was less valued as a customer. I have received calls from humans just to ask me if I am currently satisfied with my service with them.
Especially if you have a business-critical service, this should simply be a baseline requirement for support, but it's becoming shockingly rare these days.
I've had the complete opposite experience with GoDaddy support. Many of them are not so knowledgable and can easily waste time, and billing matters in particular can be quite disorganized with them if something goes wrong. I moved all my domains way from GoDaddy.
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!
This. I too dreaded the switch because of all the history, but the migration to fastmail was quick and painless, and I lost nothing. (Arguably, losing everything would've been better, so much useless noise in my history.)
Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.
Exactly the same experience for me. It's so much faster, more convenient and useful, and the migration tool was a breeze to use, I should have done it years ago.
I just stopped by to join the little FastMail fan crowd over here.
If you aren't a FastMail customer yet, you're gonna assume we're shills. We're not, it's just the sort of quality product that makes you want to tell others. It's like having found Gmail in 2005.
That seems like a minor issue in comparison to the issues with google discussed here. I mean, sure, they should honour the lifetime membership, but is it really worth losing sleep over something you paid $15 for 15 years ago (at the time of that message)?
Sure, but the sentiment in this entire discussion is how unreliable googles paid for service is (never mind their free stuff - have you ever tried to get support from google for gmail or other feee service? From what I've heard it's like talking to a wall). I'd rather pay for good service than get unknown service for free.
Now, if only good and valuable startups weren't getting bought by google by the dozens :( I guess it's your cue to start migrating to something in house when it happens.
I use GCP for "small stuff" and never have any issues at all: using GAE with the maximum number of instances set to 1 on a paid plan, using cloud storage to host static web sites, and occasionally spin up a really large VPS (their maximum memory and CPU core offering) for a short time periods to run machine learning and other large tasks.
Yes, for that reason a POC I made for a side project costed almost 100 bucks to me (I was the single user)... I never checked the current bill because I was sure the total cost would have been around 15-20... when I got charged I noticed all the previous pushed versions had a single instance running, so the costs were incremental...
Let's just say that testing out the platform by pushing a 1 page test app a few times and then being burned by a $200 bill has put me off the platform for a while.
It may be my fault for not adequately reading all their caveats, but it seems to me that the default experience shouldn't be like that.
I love Google, but their Cloud Platform is still incomprehensible to me.
AFAIK this doesn't happen by default, since by default the autoscaling will reduce instance count to 0 if the old versions aren't receiving any traffic.
The easiest way of dealing with Google is to just cancel your credit card... You won't get your money back (unless a CC dispute gets it back). Google are impossible to get any customer service from, which is why I refuse to use any of their non-free offerings (and have limited my use of their free stuff to hangouts and google docs).
Take them to small claims court, if you have a legitimate grievance. In most jurisdictions a lawyer cannot represent a defendant. At best it will get them moving. It will be sure to at least make them take notice, even if you you have at least costed them and made them account for your grievance.
edit: Meant, even if you lose you have cost them significantly an that has the intended effect of signaling they should improve customer service.
If it was the only way to recover several thousand dollars that they stuck me with I'd absolutely do it, and make sure to do a couple orders magnitude more damage to them with widespread recommendation of AWS, Azure, Linode and basically anyone but Google. It'll catch up to them eventually.
Does that matter if every Google service is run like the one in the article? That sounds a bit like saying you'll ruin any potential friendship you could have if you fought back against a bully
Google needs to fix this kind of thing if they ever want to be a real threat to AWS. AWS has publicly stated their goal to only ever lower prices and do so continuously/periodically. This kind of lock in make people leery to even try a GC service or at the least build an abstraction layer to easily be able to swap.
Funnily, I was working on cloning a particular piece of Firebase functionality, and inquired if they could help me with that (or if they had that particular piece in open source), and got more replies from them for that than apparently this paying user ever got.
Yes. They are in the "Embrace" phase of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Sure they are helpful. Have to be (considering the API drift between the Tensorflow releases and how late they were - Theano is the same exact idea and great implementation, only first released in 2009-ish).
But it's pretty easy to look a bit into the future, and predict what we would see during "Extend and Extinguish" phases of TensorFlow project.
[Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue.
There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help others avoid the same problem.
1 - The Firebase Realtime Database charges for SSL overhead on all requests (we charge for all OSI Layer 5 network usage). We’ve always had a policy of charging this way. Unfortunately, we introduced a bug late last year that began undercharging for SSL, so when the bug was fixed it surprised many people who had gotten used to the lower numbers. For most people, the change was very small. For a small number of people though with exceptional use cases (ie. tons of small network requests from IoT devices without support for session tickets), this can result in a larger change. We identified and contacted developers who were significantly affected, but this customer didn’t get the email. We should have done better. (we mention this change in our FAQ -- https://firebase.google.com/support/faq/ -- under “Why was my Realtime Database reported bandwidth lower than average”)
2 - We recently started actually enforcing overages on legacy plans and our current fixed-price ($25/mo Flame) plan. This is new -- in the past, we allowed unlimited usage on every plan, since we hadn’t built the tools to control this. This meant that many of our developers were getting far more than the listed limits for free. So you may start receiving emails now warning you of bandwidth overages, not because your usage patterns changed, but because we’re now enforcing limits for your existing usage. If you upgrade to the Blaze plan, you’ll start being billed for your full usage amounts -- so double-check your database’s “Usage” tab before upgrading.
I’ll be looking into our profiling tool to see if we can improve it to give a more complete picture of costs.
Again -- I want to apologize to the poster for the poor support experience. If others on the thread have had similar problems and feel they are not getting the attention they want from support, feel free to email me directly as well: andrew@firebase.com
What about thousands of users that will not see this reply? The gymnastics that an average user needs to do in order to contact support are ridiculous, and according to many stories here, it mostly solves nothing. Your explanation is fair enough, but I assume you guys should make a solid plan for increasing support quality and make it more available.
As of wrongly billed resources - to be honest, you are half blamed for that. I often create apps and base on SAAS reporting to see if the script behaves as expected and uses as many resources as needed. You have misled developers to believe everything is alright and now you are punishing them. I would expect some credits for time being and "transition" period.
We do often give credits to help in situations like this, though I can't speak to specifics publicly. We're working with this developer to try to resolve the issue, and we'll do so with other users who run into similar problems. This user did contact support, but we dropped the ball here. We'll be reviewing our support to find other devs we might have missed.
This problem was posted on stackoverflow 9(!) months ago http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38959321/firebase-databas...
It has been updated recently: "After 9 months of back-and-forth emails (over 40 emails), Google has acknowledged that they have found some bugs that may be responsible for high bandwidth usage, but bandwidth usage is still too high. Resolving this issue does no appear to be a priority for Google/Firebase (it took them 1.5 months to respond to the last email)."
Andrew, Firebase is great, you did a great job and looks like you are continuing to do so by engaging directly like now. Having said that, it's time you, your team or even the entire google start looking seriously at automating your support workflow. How on earth can such a popular product ignore support requests, whether it's via email or any other medium?, especially for paying users. You should have a CRM/CSM tool that should automatically assign tickets based on the email received and if not resolved within a time period should escalate directly to senior person(s) until it's acted upon.
I can only guess from my limited experience talking to people at Google and reading about their systems, but I would guess the problem is over-automation of customer support.
I also wonder who shifts through the tickets themselves. Is it the engineer straight out of Stanford with 150k combined compensation and no serious training in customer satisfaction? The curious developer who built the product and wanted to see what people thought of his/her baby? A lower paid employee in a country with a lower cost of living? Some combination of the three? I feel like the culture at Google might preclude it from ever having good customer support except for the highest paying customers.
My interpretation: 1) they always charged for SSL overhead; 2) they introduced a bug in late 2016 that underestimated SSL overhead; 3) that reduced charges for SSL overhead, and also broke flagging of Spark and Flame plans with too much SSL overhead; 4) they just fixed the bug, restoring normal estimates of SSL overhead; and 5) that restored accurate charges for SSL overhead, and also restored flagging of Spark and Flame plans with too much SSL overhead.
I'm guessing that OP's SSL overhead spiked after the measurement bug was introduced. Maybe also Firebase wasn't enforcing their limits before introducing the measurement bug, because they weren't confident about the data.
For a service that is billed based on a metric that only be measured by the provider, that provider has an important responsibility to accurately measure the metric, because important financial and technical decisions will be made based on that information. The fact that the metric was under-estimated (and therefore the costs were lower than they should have been) certainly constitutes some kind of compensation, the actual damages might be far beyond the temporary reduction in costs.
A feature might be rolled out "as is" to the entire user base after it was determined, on a small sample, that the costs per user were acceptable ; if the costs were greatly under-estimated, the company is left with a choice of discontinuing the feature (angering users) or scrambling to optimize the software, possibly starting from scratch with another technology. Or a yearly budget might have been designed based on usage estimates, only to be revealed as insufficient once actual estimates become available, and requiring an emergency cash injection for the company to pay for it.
I'm not a user of Firebase, but if our cloud provider (Microsoft Azure) were to announce that our costs had been underestimated by 2x or more, we would sue and argue that a 50% cost reduction for the past few years does not even begin to cover the strategic impact of the incorrect metric.
It's great that you're going to help the one guy who amassed a bully pulpit here on HN.
I have a question though...Why does Firebase charge ONE DOLLAR per gigabyte? 1995 called and wants their business model back.
This alone has limited my use of Firebase to Dynamic Linking for my app. Not that my app is going to smash any records, but paying customers are a good thing to get, aren't they?
It's at least potentially valid to suggest that charging the same rate for SSL overhead as for normal traffic is maybe not the best system, though, since I'm assuming that the overhead does not affect load on the value-adding servers but rather at a much more straightforward piece of the networking stack (LB or wherever SSL terminates before data gets into the proper Firebase stack).
Say, the $0.12/GB that Google Cloud Functions uses, since there's no value to the user or cost to the provider beyond what you'd see there (and indeed, one solution seems to be to simply route through cloud functions).
Is that possible, mayop100, or am I misunderstanding the system? Obviously it's not up to your users to dictate your pricing, of course, but if it's feasible it would probably earn a lot of goodwill.
> We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue.
That gets to the heart of the issue -- I think most people believe that if there had been an effective channel for communicating then the issue would never have been such a problem. But "we'll be working directly with this developer" only solves ONE PERSON'S problem. The message I would like to see you taking from this is that your team needs a better way for ALL users to reach out for support in those situations where the support is necessary.
Google doesn't have support for free products but they certainly do for paid. Whether the support is good or not is another question but it's there.
Just go to https://support.google.com/googleplay/?hl=en and click "Contact Us" in the top right. All the menu items I clicked that don't have straightforward solutions went straight to a menu where within 2-3 minutes I can get live chat or a phone call.
I've also had no problems getting help with my paid Google Apps account when I need it. For cloud there's paid support with a 4-hour response time: https://cloud.google.com/support/
We pay $150 a month for google's "silver" level support for GCE, appengine etc.
It's consistently very good - they helped us with code debugging, performance optimization, load balancing and other fairly complex issues that typically need an experienced engineer.
They do have support. I was stuck once with a friendly fella, that spent 45+ minutes talking about weather and weekend adventures to me, rather than solving my issue. It took less than 5 minutes to solve the issue, almost an hour of talk time. I would even bet money that the guy was heavily stoned.
At the end he asked me to provide positive feedback to him in exchange for friendly service. He said he will redirect me somewhere and I should give him a proper feedback. This is even while I was telling me I have no time and this is an urgent matter. At the end of the call it turned out it took him 5 minutes to solve the issue and he just wanted to chat while I was stuck at talking to him, thinking he is waiting for a solution to propagate.
This is what happens when you try to drive work-morale with a stick and carrot approach. Teach your workers good morale and lead with good example, every customer is important. But also your employees.
It is hard to believe that tools to prevent overage use in the $25 plan haven't been developed earlier. All the necessary components were there: It has always been possible to track the use of resources per user, and it has at least in the early version of Firebase been able to send out warning emails if the enforced limits are approaching. So, to me it seems like a no-brainer to combine these two, in particular for a large company like Google.
Andrew, you are a credit to Firebase, and I salute you for dropping in here and apologizing for the situation. Though you'll get some heat, I think your attitude of humility is a rare one these days, and much appreciated.
At the expense of revenue Google could lower the price to before the SSL billing fix to keep developer mindshare. There's at least one viable startup whose whole basis was baked on the 25 bucks a month use case.
So the sudden 7000% cost increase is just the normal course of business due to a bug? Wow, great business plan -- tell them the first one's free ..then they pay.
Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve are huge.
Also, I do love Bezos mantra of always becoming cheaper over time. That is the core of Amazon's brand. Whereas Oracle, IBM, and the old guard always make you pot committed and charge an arm and a leg, the Amazon guys will leave money on the table. That is how you earn trust.
Tell that to FastMail, who have pissed me off by deciding to end-of-life the "lifetime" 16Mb member account I set up for my father with a one-time $15 payment.
16Mb is modulo zero these days, but it's enough for him - he just deletes some emails when it gets full. He also gets imap access and FastMail's spam filtering, which is really very good. I can also assign him an email address from a domain that I own that is associated with my FastMail enhanced account.
I don't want my $15 back. What I DO want is for FastMail to honour our existing agreement, which was a LIFE-TIME 16 Mb member account in exchange for $15.
Back in January we contacted you with some important information about your @.* FastMail account.
We're now contacting you again to remind you that from 31st July, 2017 our 'Member' level plans will be discontinued.
To continue using your FastMail account after this time you'll need to select one of our current plans. Please note: your email address will remain the same.
As a long-time FastMail user we're offering you 50% OFF all upgrades until the end of July, which includes our already discounted multi-year subscriptions.
And if you upgrade now we'll also add all the remaining time until 31 July for free!
As an added bonus we've also given you $15 credit to put towards your subscription, which is equal to the amount you originally paid for your account.
This means if you were to upgrade to a Basic account today for one year, with the discount and account credit you are effectively getting FastMail at no charge until 31 July 2018 with a massive 2 GB of storage (up from 16 MB)!
Thanks for sharing this. I had recently set up an account with FastMail, but now that it's clear that they won't abide by their own promises, I'll look elsewhere.
Yeah, don't be so fast. I've had a legacy Enhanced account which they show no signs of removing - I went to renew it today and could (though I went to the Standard).
I've had nothing but excellent, and personal, service from them, for years. Very high availability, no canned responses.
Even when bitching about Google's support of "this address used to be with Gmail but is now external, but we'll make it problematic for other users to send it calendar invites", though in no way did I imply Fastmail was at fault, they jumped into the HN thread to say "Hey, let us know if we can be of assistance figuring out the issue".
I would be cautious about extrapolating from that. Yes, it sounds like an unfortunate decision, but I've been a FastMail user for many years and have been very happy with them.
I'm a long-time and happy Fastmail user. I'm not defending their decision, but I personally never trust "lifetime" plans of any kind -- it's impossible for a business to know they can sustain you forever, and dishonest for them to say they can.
I think you're being a bit hasty. This is literally the first negative thing I've seen anyone post about FastMail, and my experience as a customer of theirs has been fantastic.
I am a long-time Fastmail user who also was on the "lifetime" 16MB plan. Last year I switched because I wanted some features that were only available with a newer plan. I was a little annoyed to have to give up my lifetime plan but in my case it was more understandable.
I've been very happy with Fastmail for over a decade and this seems like one of the few missteps they've made. New "lifetime" 16MB accounts have not been available in years. It really doesn't seem that there could be very many of them still in active use that it would hurt anything to just continue to grandfather them, especially since they were sold explicitly as "lifetime" one-payment accounts.
There could be technical issues with keeping grandfathered plans around. Maybe the 16mb email accounts were on an old system that was getting increasingly difficult to maintain?
FastMail made an agreement - $15 in exchange for a lifetime member account.
Now they don't want to honour that agreement.
And they've created work for me: What to do about my father's email account?
I have his email address as part of the domain that I have associated with my (legacy) FastMail enhanced account. They've discontinued family accounts for new signups.
Yeah but you could move their account over physically but continue to not bill them. I doubt 16MB is anything more than a properly enforced column value in a CRM.
Curious - how could FastMail ever properly close/sunset these accounts? Were they going to regularly check on all of their customers to see if they had passed away? Was there some 'we close the email if you don't log in for 5 years straight'?
Serious question - how should these type of lifetime promises ever be properly managed? (especially when the customer is an individual)
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.
> they're a business like any other and they're not interested in minimizing profit
Actually they are. Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains. Increasing prices helps your short term profit, but you tend to lose customers to competitors. Decreasing prices means less profit right now, but you tend to convert more customers.
Companies aren't purely RIGHT NOW profit-driven. That's why many companies burn cash and take on debt. They're driven by growth (whether vertical or horizontal). Bezos is obsessed with growth. That's why they've only recently started making money. Enormous investments in AWS, FBA and a host of other products put them in the red, but in doing so, Amazon has incredibly horizontal growth.
The timeframe does not change between my first phrase and the last. Overall (as in lifetime) the company is maximizing profits (as companies are designed to do). They certainly aren't "leaving money on the table" unless it's a plan to extract even more, so I don't see why that's so great as the GP comment says. They're good competition for the industry but I don't understand how their pricing automatically engenders trust. Also value is not equal to price and many major companies understand that absolute price is rarely the significant factor.
> Minimizing profit is sacrificing short-term gains for long-term gains.
> The timeframe does not change between my first phrase and the last.
The timeframe dictates behavior. But, you responded to a comment that said Amazon will leave money on the table, arguing that they won't. They will, and do, leave money on the short-term in order to benefit their long-term strategy.
Short-term vs Long-term profit motivations are actually MASSIVELY different sets of behaviors.
> That would actually be maximizing profit...
Yes, if you assume a company is infinite that's true. But since there's currently not a company that's existed forever, I can safely assume that such a thing doesn't exist.
You can't argue profit without arguing time. Particularly when your argument was that all companies focus on profit at the exclusion of all other things. Growth companies focus on growth over profit. And while, yes, over time that can result in more profit, it also may not. If pure profit were the only motivation, short-term MASSIVE profits would be the only goal ever, since it's vastly more real than potential profits if everything works out.
I think Amazon pulls this off because their prima donna is the paying customer, not the programmer who thinks talking directly to customers is the worst possible reflection of their ability to automate. Automation is great and all, but Google has a major problem when it comes to empathizing with the customers.
Also, is there any possibility of legal action against Google for this bait and switch, which seems to be quite clearly the case here?
Bezos is worth 80B. Amazon is a global empire operating in practically owns the ecommerce industry and extracts an enormous amount of profit. What exactly are they minimizing?
Charging less to make more is actually maximizing profit for the company.
I have a game being mostly used by kids and it doesn't generate revenue, and it has been in the free tier of Firebase for about 2 years. This month suddenly my account got disabled due to DB usage (I only keep sessions and ids, still can't believe I exceeded DB usage). But the traffic was same as old. About 1.5 weeks ago I woke up at 6am with an e-mail telling me my account was disabled. And I had to switch to something else, spending hours. I don't recommend using Firebase to anyone anymore.
Exactly, for me Firebase was among those "group of cool tech I might want to try/use someday" and now it's off that list. I actually try a couple of things from thay list per month, so it's not one of those ever-growing lists.
Yep. Completely turned off from pricing to database "storage" to everything in between. Completely taking it off for my React project which I will transition to deepstream -- maybe.
not all business decisions are well-grounded in financial upside. a lot of dysfunctional outcomes are a result of organizational dysfunction and broken culture. a company can be making bad decisions for reasons related to internal dysfunction, and be losing money on it, and persist in this because of their dysfunctional culture.
as many in this thread have pointed out: Google has a dysfunctional culture w.r.t. customer service.
Wowow! In this position my first step would be to determine if there's any legal basis for disputing the charge (an informal conversation with a lawyer or even just someone who's been through a similar experience is a fine start). Even when a billing change is disclosed in advance and the customer actually uses the bandwidth, massive spikes in metered pricing are a tricky area and have attracted the attention of regulators in the past--for instance telecoms have come under fire by charging sky-high overage fees for mobile data and not warning you until you've already racked up a few extra zeroes worth of charges on your next bill.
Also, immediately dispute the charge with your credit card company, as you want this on their radar. Their interests are aligned with yours to at least some degree (if Google's causing financial distress for one of their customers with thousands of dollars in unanticipated charges, how many others may get hit?).
Aside from that, if things played out as described: major dick move, Google! Is "do no evil" a bad joke these days? Seriously, though, Google is not a dumb company and my guess is that if the right person was made aware of this case (e.g., anyone who understands that the most important word in "customer relationship" is the second one), they would make it right.
I'm totally on the side of the author: when possible, it's worth a little extra elbow grease to build your business on top of free, self-hosted software instead of proprietary SaaS. Think of it as insurance against cases like this one.
I would also doubt that it would be worth it even without keeping in mind the risk of loosing the service. Google is usually pretty clever when it comes to TOS Agreements.
> telecoms have come under fire by charging sky-high overage fees for mobile data
Telecoms is a very heavily regulated industry.
> Also, immediately dispute the charge with your credit card company
No, don't do that. Most credit card companies require you to try and resolve the issue with the merchant before filing a chargeback. Sometimes they give you a time period, e.g. at least 30 days.
> In this position my first step would be to determine if there's any legal basis for disputing the charge
Let's calm down.
The first step is to pay the bill, set up better infrastructure monitoring on your end, so you don't act surprised that you are consuming 7000% more resources than third party service is reporting.
Then, if you want to burn some money, you can file a petition and tell the court that you deserve to get free service because you did not know that you have been going over the reported data by 50%, I mean 7000% for... two years.
As far as I understood, Firebase didn't report it before. As mentioned, the meter "suddenly jumped" to 100GB and then 180GB (if I remember the numbers correctly).
The author decided to figure it out with support later, which makes sense if the previous number was something like 20-30GB and you guess it's simply in error.
"Don't be evil." was dropped in 2015 or thereabouts IIRC. I'd guess when they realised it was becoming more of a joke than a motto: "Google, the company who's motto is 'don't be evil' angered customers again today when ...
...
The new code of conduct has a close approximation of the philosophy—though perhaps more formally phrased—in the very first sentence of the preface: "Employees of Alphabet... should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect."
I use Firebase and find it easy, useful and constantly improving (cloud functions etc.). Their support, however, is a joke.
5 questions can be logged per year for one-on-one email support and then you're on your own. And this is for urgent requests.
I can understand not wanting to be inundated with wasteful questions but when Firebase is changing their API and pricing plans and you're trying to scale a product, and paying them lots of money in the process, support should be forthcoming.
They also don't respond on their Twitter handle, which is a further crime.
Dan from Firebase here. I’d like to clarify a few details about the support options that are available. First, the limit of five questions per year applies only to technical troubleshooting questions (i.e. some indeterminate issue in your code that you’d like help with). Developers are always able to contact us an unlimited number of times for issues relating to identified bugs or to request features. Additionally, any questions relating to your account or bills (such as the issue in the original post) are also unlimited.
With that said, it’s been a year since we introduced the five-a-year limit on technical troubleshooting questions. I’ll see if this is actually a useful limit to keep in place and remove it if not.
Thanks for explanation, Dan. My issue is that the switch to the 3.x SDK and moving my assets to Firebase hosting depleted 4 of my 'technical troubleshooting questions' (two of those were bug reports which seem to no longer deduct from the five-a-year limit).
So now I'm looking at a message telling me that 'for all urgent requests...you have 1 question remaining' and hoping that nothing bad happens more than once between now and whenever you decide to allow me, a paying customer, to ask for help again.
To make clear: 99.9% of the time Firebase just works, which is great. And when I did receive support, it was excellent. It's the support model that's weak. Making billing and bug reports unlimited while limiting urgent requests to five a year is poor policy, and not very useful - for your customers at least.
Yes, I understand completely. The intent of the limit is obviously not to discourage legitimate issues from reaching our team. Limits like this are a blunt instrument, and it's possible that the time has come to remove it.
I can't promise a change immediately, but I am taking a very close look at what we can do here.
For technical questions Puf seems to be telepathically connected to StackOverflow. He has answered any of my questions within a an hour or two at the most.
We've also gone from ~$25/mo to $1000-2000/mo with the pricing change. While it's not the end of the world (we're near shipping replacements for FB stuff anyway), there's also been 3-4 incidents of downtime (> 1 hour) in the last 2 months, with no way to contact anyone except their stupid web form.
No - how do you opt in? Can't find it on any of the billing or pricing pages, and can only find the message "we do not currently offer Enterprise contracts, pricing, or support".
That said, we'd only need support to get ETAs on outages being resolved ><
I think there's a major difference between say, support figuring out how to implement their product, which is a you problem, their service is working fine.
And a wholly different one if they screw up and you can't talk to them about it without paying them.
The former is an incentive to self-serve and investigate yourself, the latter is an incentive for the company to provide shoddy service to people pay to resolve it.
Tiered support contracts are common in enterprise software. If the base level of service were bad, nobody would use the software, and that's clearly not the case here.
(More common is the Oracle/IBM-style approach of making your docs vague enough that you need professional services to actually integrate the product).
A free level of support that requires answering within of 14 days to any issues via email, letter, or phone, and providing an address that a letter can be sent to, is required by law in the entire EU for any paid services.
It all depends how dependant customers on a product. At one point I worked for a company that successfully charged customers for fixing obvious bugs in a software on top of expensive support contructs. The sad part it worked for some time.
So, they discovered they were under billing by measuring bandwidth via the server logs instead of at the switch. Then proceeded to not tell a soul they would be making a change that has the potential to greatly increase your bill. Do I have that right?
> Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path!
Isn't using AWS Lamba as your gateway, trapping you into using a specific service, just as much as firebase was?
This times and again.
If you're hitting an API hosted on a domain you don't control, you're bound to get screwed.
Otherwise they would just be able to deploy a simple Firebase API proxy (for the single call that they use) that uses TLS tickets and keep alive, change the DNS records and call it a day.
You wouldn't have clients talk to AWS Lambda directly. You'd put it behind API Gateway, which would allow you to use your own domain in front. Your clients would just know to send requests to https://myapi.mycorp.com.
Since you control the domain, you could then stop something like this more quickly.
Solution here is to make sure all api endpoints and URLs used in your code (eg into services such as lambda) get mapped through a domain that you can control / change via DNS. Then you can always cut off a service or redirect all requests to a different endpoint of your choosing (eg another serverless system or your own backend). This is better than hardcoding an unalterable endpoint / url / domain in your code that is beyond your own control, and it is doubly important if updating code on your product is difficult or impossible.
Why was my Realtime Database reported bandwidth lower than average between September 2016 and March 2017?
For our bandwidth calculations, we normally include SSL encryption overhead (based on layer 5 of the OSI model). However, in September 2016, we introduced a bug that caused our bandwidth reporting to ignore encryption overhead. This might have resulted in artificially low reported bandwidth and bills on your account for a few months.
We released a fix for the bug in late March 2017, returning bandwidth reporting and billing to their normal levels.
How is expended computational power (to encrypt) relevant for the bandwidth bill though? I understand it's an expense for them, but (1) 7500% is not a correction in measurements (they must have noticed that over 2 years if it actually costs that much) and (2) it's a completely new expense category (if your plans are bandwidth-based, you can't just force someone into a larger plan when bandwidth stayed the same, you should announce and explain the change in plans).
I'm guessing they had to update this FAQ after they started ignoring the OP (and other customers) messages. Also, something is wrong with the timeline with regards to the OP's blogpost where they say they've been using Firebase for a while.
Yeah OP says they've been using FB with similar costs for over two years, so I highly doubt they're complaining about something that was only a problem for the last 6 months.
> It was extremely hard to write this article for fear of being looked down upon for our mistakes. I can only hope that some of you may learn from our embarrassing mistakes and implement solutions to the growing problem of service trap.
Kudos for writing it down. This kind of cautionary articles are very valuable and much needed.
Moreover, getting to front page of HN is one of the very few ways to have your case resolved by some googler accidentally passing by - hopefully someone will help the guys.
They said the issue was due to TLS tickets and not setting keep alive values. TLS tickets are await of resuming a TLS session without having to renegotiate it, considering that you are only polling for a boolean, that negotiation overhead could be much greater then the actual being passed. This isn't something specific to firebase so that's why no library would mention it.
Keep alive is a flag that allows you to reuse a single connection instead of closing it, if it's closed then again you have to renegotiate things. So it sound like you may have been inadvertently spamming them with tls connection requests, the fact that they said they were counting blocked requests makes it passable that you were also sending invalid tls handshakes.
This would make the real issue that they had been previously underreporting your usage and now are correctly counting it. Now if they had wanted to keep your business they should have, you know, warned your first or helped you fix your code instead of just surprising you like that. The fact that the change was going to cause a customers bill to spike should have been a red flag to them.
I agree with you, but I also agree with the other voices here stating that you should keep prices the same for customers that, according the the article, use your product in the same way for quite a while.
Yeah, maybe this wasn't the best or most efficient way to poll. But if it worked for years and doesn't destroy the (Google..) infrastructure?
Your mistake, FB. Suggest changes, but don't inflate the prices in an instant.
probably not something they need to worry about here as it's just polling for booleans so forward security is probably not as high a priority as other use cases.
That's the same, old vendor lock-in approach. It has happened with the servers, databases, network equipment etc. now it happens with cloud -- nothing unexpected, prepare to see more of these when cloud market stabilizes and clear leaders emerge. That's why I always prefer open solutions, that can be moved/migrated/replaced easily and advise others to do the same.
Eh, it looks like the service provider hadn't taken into account an oddball use case in the pricing / metering, and then suddenly did.
They certainly should have communicated that better and their tools / charts should have a way of showing the billable data, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it vendor lock-in. It's not like everyone on Firebase is complaining and the author admits they made major mistakes.
Just "communicating better" is not a reasonable response to making such a dramatic change in how much money you charge someone. If I tell you I'm going to punch you in the face, that doesn't make the punch acceptable behaviour.
Cloud services that pull this kind of bait and switch deserve to be ridiculed and lose lots of business over the negative PR. Cloud services that unintentionally pull this kind of bait and switch but then don't make it right or provide meaningful support deserve no special treatment.
From the GGP and some of your other comments here, it seems like you are arguing that communication is the main problem here rather than the change itself. Sorry if that was a misunderstanding.
But why do providers get a free pass when they do a major mistake (à la GitLab losing tons of not-backed-up data), but customers are required to accept whatever the provider throws at them? It seems pretty unfair to me.
Providers to some degree get a free pass when they do their best to fix their mistakes.
In Gitlab's case, their response was excellent and their total data loss was less than a day's work - and even that only for a full time manipulator of gitlab metadata (project managers? some parts of QA?): "Database data such as projects, issues, snippets, etc. created between January 31st 17:20 UTC and 23:30 UTC has been lost. Git repositories and Wikis were not removed as they are stored separately." ( https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o... )
Considering that "[...] out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place." ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GCK53YDcBWQveod9kfzW-VCx... ), this was a pretty amazing result, and about the best a response they could make. That, combined with their transparency, earns something of a pass (especially when data loss I care about is already limited by git's DVCS nature, even if they had obliterated the repository data.)
In Firelab's case, if no other action is taken, they've actively mislead their customer in failing to follow through on crediting their account, charged them an obscene and unsupported price hike, and gone incommunicado. That's like... an anti-pass.
Chances are they also knew when they fixed the bug that it would result in price hikes. They could have easily generated a report showing which customers would be impacted, allowing them to contact them ahead of time.
I don't think they should get a free pass, but I don't think they should be beholden forever to be under-metering traffic if they made a mistake and weren't counting part of it (as it seems to be the case here).
To that extent, they should have communicated this better, ideally 90 days out perhaps even with phone calls for customers whose bill will increase notably.
I'm not implying that this was made on purpose -- vendor lock-in might happen "naturally" as well, when company becomes big enough that they can start unilaterally change prices/conditions/services knowing that costumers will accept that (even grudgingly), because they have nowhere else to go or it is too expensive/complex. Google is the perfect example of this strategy. Smaller player or startup would probably go bankrupt very fast if acted with such disregard for their costumers.
So far I've seen only one customer notably affected, and (judging by the post) I doubt they'll be sticking around on Firebase. There are a lot of take-aways for this story, but I don't think "vendor lock-in" really fits.
I've only used Firebase for really small pet projects, and one of the big drivers making me hesitant to actually use it at work was the really large difficulty in actually transparently getting a grip on what my usage looked like.
A while ago their pricing model was based on concurrent connections to the live DB, but then you read the docs and it seemed to suggest that you had to do a different kind of math to actually figure out what your REAL usage was. Well, they decided that was way to complicated and so they nixed it. This scenario just reveals that this isn't really the issue -- the issue is trying to obfuscate what the real factors that the billing is based on. If they literally just gave you a dashboard with a breakdown of where the source of your bill would come out to, in detail, it would alleviate 100% of these issues. All we need/ed was better monitoring!
I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses.
First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers).
When you look at it through this lens, you can see how Google as an institution can tolerate experimenting with ideas that are disconnected from revenue models and dropping failed ideas like hot potatoes. It makes sense for them to behave that way.
Amazon's services are almost always designed with either a concrete or direct path to revenue upfront and they have a huge customer support infrastructure they can tap into. They move a little slower in certain areas of R&D because customer obsessed businesses are tolerant of deprecating technology when it doesn't work out. That means they'll do more market research, take less risks and focus on tenaciously steady growth rather than trying to always hit it out of the park.
When choosing a vendor, it's important to understand how their offerings affect the solvency of their business and whether it fits into their core competency.
In this case, Firebase's prices were too low. That should have been a warning sign. The other warning sign is Firebase is a such a small percentage of Google's revenue, Google doesn't have a huge incentive to fix customer service issues.
Have you used them recently? Their support has been extremely good in my experience, and I'm far from a premium customer. Email/phone support readily available. Loads of their engineers available over slack.
Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive (this applies to both Operational Transform and Differential Synchronization approaches).
The price of Firebase was probably kept artificially low to attract new users but this was a ticking timebomb.
Those people/companies who are using Firebase as their primary database are going to suffer now.
It should really only be used for specific applications where datasync makes sense such as collaborative text editing.
I wouldn't even recommend using it for chat because it's really easy for the complexity to get out of hand there and you can usually achieve similar results using a combination of pub/sub and REST.
> Synchronizing data in real-time is computationally expensive
No, its not. I was responsible for implementing, deploying and managing the infrastructure at lever.co when we were a tiny fledgeling startup. The entire application is built on top of JSON OT. I took some measurements at one point when we had ~thousands of active browser sessions of our app. At the time we were seeing about 1-2 OT merges (transform + re-apply) per day. All the other non-concurrent operations can get sent straight to the database. I don't know what the numbers are now, but I'd be shocked if OT ever becomes the bottleneck.
For text based OT you'll see more concurrent edits. But for text based OT, I have a little C library that can comfortably do 20 million simple text OT transforms/second on a single core of my old 2012 macbook air. Good luck making that a bottleneck.
I guess it somewhat depends what kind of OT we're talking about (text or JSON). In any case, I don't think that the bottleneck would
be the OT algorithm itself - More likely, the bottleneck would be the number of messages (HTTP requests or WebSocket frames) required to send each individual operation between the client and server.
If you have text-based OT and you send an operation over the wire each time a user presses a key, and if you do this for every single input field in your app, it's going to add up.
Not saying it's not feasible but it's not going to be as fast as making a plain REST call for those use cases that don't require synching.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if OT turns out to be much faster than differential transform in terms of raw algorithm speed but again I think the bottleneck will be the number of frames/requests that need to go over the wire.
> Not saying it's not feasible but it's not going to be as fast as making a plain REST call for those use cases that don't require synching.
The whole point of OT is that it lets you fearlessly merge concurrent edits. You can lean on that to rate limit messages to or from the client, if you need to. Because the client can always apply its own edits immediately to its own local model, there's no perceived latency. So, if you design your system right you can batch up changes at any granularity you like (per page, per form, per second, dynamically based on load, whatever). Of course, the tradeoff is that you lean on the OT system more by batching up edits. But it can be made effectively free to transform if the edits modify different parts of the database (using range trees to cull, etc).
But yeah - it is much faster than differential transform. I'm not sure how good diffing algorithms are in practice, but best case they need to scan the entire document. On the other hand OT only requires size & computation proportional to how much was changed. If we're collaboratively editing a 10kb text file, changes will mostly only be a few bytes each. And applying each change using a good rope library is a O(log n) operation.
Of course, all this requires a database which supports OT out of the box whistles innocently
I authored the post and yes you are correct about the AWS Lambda being another service. I have since modified it based on a users suggestion to reflect.
I guess the point was that by adding the middleman between it there was more control --- We are self-funded and small group of people. We can't afford to hire a bunch of people to know about containers and servers and every little detail.
Thanks for your comments! Didn't expect so many views so quickly on this...
The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure. Not to mention they would have been paying the full costs of their bandwidth from the start.
The real lesson to learn here is to never hit a paid service going through a domain you don't control. DNS and proxy tricks would have saved the day.
> The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure.
"We went from a Skype group of 10 beta testers to hundreds of active users, then thousands in only a few short months."
Getting off the ground required supporting thousands of users. That doesn't require buying a bunch of servers. Rent one basic physical machine from Hetzner or whoever, spend an afternoon setting up PostgreSQL, and you're done. Reactionary, perhaps, but hardly revisionist.
It doesn't sound like it's the 'serverless' hosting that is their issue, rather that they have no direct control over the endpoint that their difficult to upgrade client software is hitting. They actually fix it in future versions of the client software by putting controllable serverless endpoints in front of the firebase endpoints they're hitting, so if something like this occurs again they could just change their endpoint to not hit the third-party resource that is costing them so much money.
The more general problem with serverless architectures that this post illustrates is that you're essentially running on a series of FAAS/SAAS style services which can change their billing at any time.
So you either have to code a portability layer so you can move to another one in the event of an unwanted change (which could be quite a lot of work), or you accept the risk that a 3rd party could cost you a lot of money until you can change off their service (which could be quite technically challenging depending on the complexity of your use case and the availability of comparable alternatives)
Whilst with things like container services you retain more control (ultimately you can self-host if need be) as soon as you step onto pure serverless you'll always be at the mercy of the providers of the services you use.
I think they make it pretty clear the problem is with their inability to change the endpoint (i.e. the URL). Switching from lambda to something else could be a pain in the ass but they'd be hitting their own domain and changing where that points is relatively trivial. Right now they have clients out there hitting a Firebase endpoint that they have no control over and that they can't update quickly.
The 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.
"Welll, we have this there chalkboard that we write what we think your price is. And some intern draws lines on a graph to match what we think it is. Oh, proof? Nahh, we dont do that. Oh, logs? Nope, you'll just have to trust us..."
I think Firebase was kind of douchebags assuming the story is correct, if you change how people are billed you should give people time to adjust their software.
Stuff like that makes me want to host everything myself as it will for sure be the cheapest option.
Hosting by yourself is always the safest long-term solution, even if you are hosting it in the cloud, you at least protect yourself from this "Company reserves the right to change the TOS at any time..."
Evaluation of technologies is an important skill for any developer to learn.
Lock-in on a proprietary technology that powers your company should be a giant red flag.
In some cases, you are obligated to use a third party (Payment Processing) but if
it is a core part of your business you should really think about why you are unable to
do it yourself. I've seen a few demos of firebase before and while their demos are highly
polished, there is nothing they offer that couldn't be done by open source tools.
A hard lesson learned, but hopefully this company will pull through.
> In some cases, you are obligated to use a third party (Payment Processing) but if it is a core part of your business you should really think about why you are unable to do it yourself.
I'd think getting paid is a core part of every business! Tho I'll admit basically no one can do it themselves.
I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for renting equipment vs the cloud.
I've never understood the advantages of these services except for when you have drastic usage changes throughout the day.
But all the younger folks seem to think it's awesome:
"Look ma, I didn't even need to register my own domain, wait for DNS propagation, or install software, or wait a few days for hardware to be provisioned. That cut my MVP time from 30 days to 25 days!"
For about $250/m I can get a dedicated windows server that can handle just about anything a startup can throw at it. Sure it's work, but not too much work.
Hardware matters. I would estimate the cost of running in the cloud to be 3-4x more expensive than rented hardware. The $60/m VPS you're getting with a virtual core is usually one hyperthread on one actual core. That's a lot of money for so little and hourly billing doesn't help if you're using it 24/7.
The proprietary SAAS situation is even worse than VPSs. Besides the lock in, the billing is so abstracted from reality that you'll never realize how much you're overpaying.
Except the young ones that know how to use the tech, can go:
Hey this portion of my load is HIGHLY flexible. I can use a very simple celery queue to scale this out to 1000 preemptible instances, and pay literally peanuts to harness the power of 1000 computers for the 30 minutes I need it, then shut it down for the other 23.5 hours a day.
There are a wide range of ways to do things. From Heroku to Bare Metal to EC2 to Lambda to managed services (like Firebase). I think they all can be a win in the right case. If you are always using the same solution (in your case, maybe rented window servers?), I would heavily question if you are using the right tech. And personally as soon as I hear people running Windows to run actual code that does work, I shudder a bit.
Depends. You can use docker on top of say a container-OS and not need to know anything linux (and in fact you can't even do anything linux, it is all locked down and readonly).
Of course hardware matters. Of course it is embarrassing to have your entire business model crushed by how you built your product. It happens in many ways.
If you are, like me, not experienced with running servers I can see how going cloud helps getting started. I would have trouble setting up my own servers with backup, software and security. But it's probably good to start learning about these things so you can think about running your own servers.
If you're building web apps, you should learn about web servers. I realize that's an obvious statement, but a little can go a long way if you have no experience.
I can appreciate the appeal of a Backend-as-a-Service offering like Firebase, particularly if you're a one-person frontend-heavy dev team; it seems like it gives you a lot of leverage in the early experimentation stages. I'd like to play with it some day soon.
But this sort of incident really underscores the business value of having an exit strategy from whatever cloud you're running in.
That's why I like Kubernetes, since you can just spin up a new cluster on whatever cloud you want (or on-prem), and all your app deploy scripts remain the same.
Likewise for the choice of boring data store (Postgres/MySQL). I'm happy to pay a cloud provider to run my DB for me, because I know I can trivially redeploy in another hosted DBaaS or on-prem solution if I had a need to do so.
You could make the same case for running your stack on VMs that you manage; pick your poison.
This is exactly why we moved out of Firebase once it got acquired by google. We knew support would become nonexistent and we would also run the risk of Google shutting down the service for no good reason.
did you go to self hosted or is there a firebase style real time db provider that is already at scale? basically it would have to be AWS or Azure for me to feel comfortable. Does AWS have something now?
Did a Firebase team member already comment on this? In a few hours Google will present some new Firebase features at io17, and I would expect them to avoid bad press now as much as possible...
I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.
I was thinking the same thing. There's a giant circle of patting each other on the back every time they roll something out, and always have that very precise disclaimer that they work for the big G.
Then again, as a meta comment I will point out that the fact that both you and I so clearly notice this suggest that we are following these updates much more closely then most of the folks here.
True, I used to be really interested in Firebase and their set of products. But because of several pretty bad experiences related to vendor lock-in and (very) high prices I switched over to an open source alternative.
It might not be so well known, but I found http://www.deepstream.io to have a relatively similar feature set, without having to deal with bad support (if it bothers you, just fix it yourself) and high prices, since you are the one who picks what suits you best.
I was about to post the same thing. Of the two Google cloud stories I saw on here yesterday, it felt like one in three posts had "disclaimer: I work on the Google cloud team" or something to that effect. As of this writing, there's 100 comments over 4 hours and not a peep from any of them that I see.
Sometimes I am wondering who is actually steering the discussion to a certain point. I wouldn't go so far to call it censorship, but if the Google employees take over the comment section, it is very hard to call the flow of information "unbiased".
YCombinator shouldn't let companies use Hacker News as a marketing tool, at least not to the extent Google does.
Or it's just engineers that swarm around since that's the demographic here but this needs a response from PR, not from engineering. What do you want google/firebase engineers to say?
The engineering response is pretty clear-cut. Polling every minute from an uncached SSL connection is expensive, don't do that. That's pretty obvious and the author admits this was a mistake. The complaint is about everything that's not the engineering part - support & communication.
I'm sorry, I can have 50'000 devices poll every minute via an uncached SSL connection on my 16$/month server from Online.net, including bandwidth and traffic costs.
I'm not sure what you're smoking, but I want that, too.
Seriously, at Google, TLS is terminated in hardware, and bandwidth costs less than a cent per terabyte for ISPs or Google.
The costs that this caused are basically nil.
(This, btw, is why I'm using kubernetes on rented bare metal, paying 30$ a month, for what would cost me, including traffic, around 900$ (Google Cloud with rented servers) to 63'000$ (Firebase) a month.)
I would assume you get the support if you pay for it. Google, Azure and AWS seem to have all gone the same way. You select the service level and pay monthly fee. I don't know if this support covers Firebase.
Yes and no. If an AWS customer ran up a bill like this, Amazon would absolutely cover them. They've done it hundreds of times. There's a very different culture between Google and Amazon when it comes to customer service.
Yeah this 'bug' has also bit us once, when we first started using LogMeIn. At first the fees were reasonable and we decided to go with them to do customer support on their PCs running our software.
Every year since then, the cost has gone up significantly (ransomware?) and we always bit the bullet, until we finally dropped them.
> 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.
Google Cloud support[1] comes with phone numbers to call at $400/month. It's a minimum requirement for anything that's mission critical. I understand that this poster was paying $25 a month typically, so it's not unreasonable that he didn't also shell for the $400/mo support package though it left him in the lurch when he had a time critical problem.
Realistically, I don't see why he didn't simply shut down the service the first day usage numbers spiked. Something that's only costing $25 a month to host, shouldn't have a huge opportunity cost when shut down.
I find it hard to reconcile this suggestion at the bottom of the article
> Always build your architecture in a way that will avoid becoming trapped into a specific service. Amazon’s AWS Lambda sitting between any services and your app is a strongly recommended path!
- Build without depending on external services
- You can do this by depending on this external service
I don't feel that relying on an external service is always bad as long as there's no vendor lock-in with technologies that are open standards. Case in point the managed postgresql and mysql services that Amazon, MS, and Google all support. That said I'm extremely wary of Cloud Spanner and Azure Cosmos DB or any specialized service that the big 3 offer.
Using Firebase or similar is akin to opening a restaurant that serves take-away pizzas from a nearby Pizza Hut, after nicely putting them in a porcelain plate.
If Pizza Hut changes the pricing, you either close shop or adapt.
"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."
I really don't understand why anyone expects anything different from Google these days. Or possibly ever. "Don't be evil" ironically turned out to be a particularly evil marketing ploy.
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 $10000 tomorrow.
I'm guessing that spamming invalid request on all of firebases customers endpoints is the most efficient way to deal with the whole ordeal... If a large enough customer base gets the problem they'll have to act... Unless they can happily close up shop because Google owns them... Ah well :(
Shame on them for not giving notice and a proper explanation of the change. They were vastly under reporting the cost of providing the service. Consider that they are a business.
Shame on you for not using resumable TLS sessions/Keep alive. You're hammering their infrastructure. The change in how they meter usage is seeing you having to compensate them for the resource they provide you.
No, because most self-hosted services are 10-20x cheaper than comparable SaaS offerings. In the realtime space Firebase is particularly known for being really expensive for the scalable plans (blaze plan).
> No, because most self-hosted services are 10-20x cheaper than comparable SaaS offerings.
This has nothing to do with the fact that it could be hit by a botnet, as per the exact point I commented on, could 'wreck your card', it's simply a question of scale.
If you read the fine print of the ones with "no bandwidth costs" you'll find that service becomes throttled after a certain level of usage. These are businesses, they have to make money to operate, they're not in this for charity
> Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling.
But legitimately using lots of bandwidth isn't the same as a DoS attack. Try and remember that bandwidth isn't the only resource being used.
> Scaleway
In my experience they throttle your CPU usage after a while.
> Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.
At no point did I suggest using Firebase was a good idea. I said it's always cheaper to run your own services in the long run, and that they'd have found out their own problems (see my first reply) sooner.
But my point is that you won't even ever have an issue with overusing traffic or CPU during a DoS, and the issue will be purely that your bandwidth will be saturated.
Vs. AWS, Firebase, etc where your limit will be your bank account instead.
Agreed in part, however TLS Tokens and Keep alive aren't specific to this vendor... it's something that the author should be doing anyway. If they were to self host rather than contract out the underlying service upon which they depend they may have figured this out sooner.
I feel like a dinosaur running all of our services on dedicated server infrastructure (OVH) but every time I see stories like this I'm glad I do. Unlimited bandwidth, a fixed monthly fee, absolutely zero surprises. I think far too many startups jump immediately into the cloud, where costs and volatility are magnitudes higher than your own infrastructure.
One day they'll just realize they've lost, partly due to their shit attitude to customer support, and close their public cloud.
FFS if you run a public cloud you've just damn well GOT to understand you can never cut off the customer service for any reason, especially "because your site got too busy".
What a bunch of PhDs.
The reason Google is so deeply unwilling to engage its customers to provide support is in the DNA of the company - they are all PhDs, and how many PhDs have the slightest idea of how to help and talk to a customer.
> The reason Google is so deeply unwilling to engage its customers to provide support is in the DNA of the company - they are all PhDs, and how many PhDs have the slightest idea of how to help and talk to a customer.
No they aren't lol. The majority of Google employees have B.S. degrees. The reason Amazon is so good at this stuff is because, at their core, they do everything they can to make the customer happy. Google doesn't really understand that. Not because they are PhD's (like, what the hell does that matter), but because customer service was never a thing they needed to do.
I got burned by firebase in a similar way. I was using their worker queue library and found my bill for a zero user app had gone from $0 to $100. Couldn't get a straight answer from support on why the worker queue was eating so much bandwidth.
Did some experiments and learned the queue downloaded every task in the queue each time it started. The authors assured me that wasn't the case at first, but eventually acknowledged that this was exactly how it worked.
Terrible experience overall, glad to have moved away from firebase.
I am so surprised why people buy into some SAAS software that does simple things instead of hiring 2 programmers from cheap location (somewhere between India and Poland western border), getting Hetzner VPS or dedicates server (even the second option is cheap, including a few administrator hours) and be done.
It is not so hard to predict failure/buy out of some SAAS provider, it happened so many times. I am curious why Venture Capital investors are not looking at that problem closely.
Nothing in the entire VC Funded startup scene makes sense when you try to apply basic logic, much less a sane way to operate a sustainable business.
But that's just it: These companies are funded by people who are simply in it to make a profit, (as opposed to people who want to actually achieve something with their efforts). Users become dollar signs, and it's all about how quickly you can get enough new users to monetise the bejeezus out of their attention/personal information/etc, before they dump you for the next new flavour of the week.
They have already 'issues' by paying 2k per month for firebase. I don't think you start at some provider for under 500 euros per month for support only. The initial setup is probably much higher.
And than you don't have any control over your infrastructure as well because someone else has theknowledge not you.
I don't see any advantages doing this as long as you are small. Those few hundred dollars are better investet in simple SAAS.
> Still cheaper for a single dev starting a startup to hook up to Firebase/AWS/Azure than hiring 'cheap' devs from Poland.
Yes but you gotta be smart here. It's not like Firebase is the only database out there. And once your product grows, and you hit Firebase limits which forces you in the "pay as you go" plan, whatever cheapness you thought you bought into quickly becomes a huge expanse.
Of course it's not and I feel sorry for the author, but being smart doesn't mean that you know everything from dev to setting up servers. Most startups are just quickly glued up. What the author and team could do after they started growing is to start slowly moving to own infrastructure/backend. I'd advise any startup anyways to start with Saas and when money starts showing up then hire the remote guy to set up infrastucture.
To me it seems they correlate bandwidth usage with system usage and charge you using bandwidth as a surrogate of computing time, hardware and lahour (plus the bandwidth).
i really really hope all you lot complaining you got burned are the same people who downvoted my previous account out of existence when i said you would get burned 12 months ago or so.
Sadly I reckon it was more likely the people who burned you who were doing the down voting.
meanwhile, the servers i bought have now more than paid for themselves many times over and our operating costs have fallen to nearly zero.
Yikes ! Do these(Google Cloud) guys not know that they are competing with AWS and Azure ? Do they not realize support and billing practices and trust are competitive advantages ?
We started using Firebase when it just launched, primarily because the top end plan said $200 for (almost) unlimited use. For what we were doing at that time this was a huge deal. Firebase have changed their pricing a couple of times since then. All said and done it's still a great service and we use Firebase in almost all our projects.
Maybe unrelated, but at the same time we started using Firebase, we started using (then) another startup called Intercom (www.intercom.io). Intercom was priced a flat $ 49 (or 50, do not remember exactly) then and it was a bargain for us. But since then Intercom has changed their pricing so many times that we ended up paying more for Intercom than for all our servers put together. Intercom is again a great service but we stopped using it because it wasn't worth the price.
Depends on whether it is OTC options versus a more bespoke product, but in general, counterparty risk is something which investors have more or less appetite for. If you're engaged with OTC options via the Options Clearinghouse Corporation, you're engaged in a system with "approximately but not exactly zero" appetite for counterparty risk.
If you're e.g. the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and you call up Goldman Sachs and say "Make me a market in naked puts on Citi, at-the-money, with expiry in a year; I'm thinking about a billion dollars worth", I give you excellent odds on them being able to put that trade together for you. I mean, it will cost you a lot of money, but Saudi Arabia doesn't call Goldman Sachs up and expect it to not cost them a lot of money, now do they.
You could cut down costs or at least improve cost-predictability by hosting something like https://deepstream.io/ instead of Firebase. The problem however is that you are still exposed to your cloud provider's fees - if AWS or Google Cloud up their band-with cost, you're in the same boat. Than again, the independence gained by running a server in a basement comes with a very hefty penalty.
This is why Google continue to lag behind AWS and Azure for cloud services - people live in fear that they will prematurely terminate the service or abruptly change the price without warning. Throw in poor marketing, terrible support and incomplete documentation and they have a perfect recipe for failure. I really wish some senior people over there would get their shit together. I WANT them to be a compelling competitor, but right now they are miles away from being that.
> Obviously our app being shut down and our users being cut off was not an option.
I wonder how many companies shut down due to this. My company is in a similar situation (not a tech cost but still) and it feels unbelievable that we may need to shut down even though we have so many customers. I never hear about these stories though, as if all companies have a large buffer that can handle these increases.
I have to say... I don't understand what about Firebase's offering is SO killer or unique. I feel like it would be very easy to roll one's own custom 'Firebase.' I'm unsure as to why anyone would ever choose to predicate their businesses continued existence on another platform, especially one that can be replicated in like, an afternoon.
Can you replicate it and open source it tomorrow afternoon please? :) I'll pay for your time.
While what they did was certainly a dick move, this type of comments trivzializes and diminishes the work the firebase engineers put it. Incidentally it also implies that google is full of stupid execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon.
I can definitely do that. I only collect payments up front, so fork it over and I will have it for you tomorrow, likely even tonight.
I think what I said ("I don't understand what firebase does that is so killer or unique") is very different from what you are reading ("firebase is useless, firebase's engineers do stupid work, and google is full of student execs with money that pay millions of tech that can be build by one dev in an afternoon"). I think your characterization of my statement is more than a bit unfair.
I'm still at a loss for what firebase is beyond a key value store with web sockets. I think it would be a problem to scale a platform like this on ones own -- maybe that's why to use Firebase? I've used it in hackathon settings where I didn't want to roll my own backend, or to mock web-sockets pre Django 1.9 / Channels.
Still, if I had a business that depended on a key value store with web sockets I would definitely build it myself.
A couple more things regarding the trivialization of the engineers work:
1: Just because work is done does not mean it is important
2: It is possible to say that the product is not special or unique and yet the hard work that is done to keep that product up all of the time and scale it to many of customers is special.
Stories like there are why I won't consider Google as an infrastructure provider for our SaaS, regardless of the technicals around their services. Thank you to the original author/s for writing the post, it reinforces the warning to avoid providers like this.
In HomeAutomation's case, the amounts are relatively small (though still potentially massive to them). If their monthly infra spend for firebase started out at $10k a month and went to $1m, would only way to have issues resolved still be to hit the front page of HN?
Risk factors into our technical decisions, and trust factors into risk. Particularly when billing is concerned, needing to wait a month is ridiculous. Assuming the post is accurate, ignoring billing-related emails is inexcusable. Any organisation this incompetent is one that you should not trust with your critical infrastructure.
Google is famous for not having any humans in support. One robot will write abuse on you and another robot will happily oblige and ban you with no appellation possible. Building whole business on one of such platforms takes some "courage" :) .
I know - because I am one of those humans in support grins. I work in the support organisation for GSuite (formerly Google Apps). And I work across the hall from the guys who support GCP (Google Cloud Platform). And there are an entire army of us, helping support many, many enterprise customers.
Even our consumer products have real people manning support phones - I know, because I've had to call them before (mostly Google Play Music issues - this was before I joined Google, so I couldn't use my internal pull...lol).
Regarding your second point - abuse is a real problem for any cloud provider. I know, because I happen to work in anti-abuse. It's a difficult problem to crack, and there's a lot of smart people (at many companies) trying to solve it. But please understand there are real humans at the other end, trying to provide a good service - and it's not very kind to take cheap shots at them.
There usually are appeal processes available for nearly any kind of action taken - if you were actually personally affected by an issue, or feel unsure about how something was handled - please feel free to reach out to me. I can't guarantee I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but I'm certainly willing to reach out to see what can be done.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the views expressed here are purely my own.
Apparently time after time stories arise with Googlr lack of support and are very slow at answering ans helping. In this very damn case no freakin' response. Often people have to get a Googler to initiate a Hello wothin the organization. So while we respect you doing your day work, we think your organization as a whole fail at customer support. Yeah I have read sicceyss stories too but many of them seen to be businesses with really good pocket or have deep connection with Google already or just being lucky.
Your competitor AWS would refund in less than an hour with a billing support, without going through any phone calls. Your competitor has a support subscription service at least for people to purchase (expensive but worth it). Yours?
Often, these types of blog posts only present one side of the story - so I would caution a bit of patience, to see the full story. This applies no matter what company is at the other end - whether it's us, Amazon, Facebook etc. In this case, I know there's a few technical details missing - I won't comment further on this specific issue, as far more qualified people than me are already on this issue =).
Many times, I've seen it's due to a misunderstandings, or crossed-wires regarding technical issues.
And yes, our support team does provide refunds in many cases - I know, because these sometimes get escalated to me to approve (e.g. if they're borderline). I think one was actually offered already in this case, but there may have been a misunderstanding or mix-up around that.
And yes, we have a "paid" support service - it's actually comes free with any GSuite subscription (even at the most basic level, which I think is like $5 a month). You can chat, email, or phone. I work as an engineer in the team that supports this.
For GCP (our cloud offerings), the support offering is a paid offering:
I hired a freelancer from the Philippines on Upwork to work with me on some Google App Engine issues because Google's documentation is incredibly unhelpful at times and as well as bizarrely organized.
He was from the Philippines, and it turned out he was a contractor providing "support" for Google Cloud. So I guess Google is outsourcing their support? Isn't this something Dell tried to do in the 90's with disastrous results?
http://i.imgur.com/Gu8GzLB.png (If you click it, it will pop up this modal form, which also allows you to just screenshot the offending part).
Did you try using this link on any of the pages that you found unhelpful, or bizarrely organised?
I'd encourage you to use this - as all of this feedback comes through to us via an internal system, and it does get reviewed (although I'm sure you can imagine the volume).
Otherwise feel free to reach out to me if you have specific concerns and feel more comfortable doing it that way, or you're unsure about the response you received. (Although quite frankly, I think the form is best, as that gets tracked, and anybody can jump on it).
Actually a PM I reached out to a couple of months ago did get back to me. I was disappointed at first because I heard nothing from Google Next could be uploaded online.
That had been my complaint...that the documentation was hard to get and that when I saw the images presented at Next I understood things that I had previously given up on.
Is there a large difference between using Firebase Database and another hosted DBaaS, such as MongoDB Atlas?
I use Firebase Database but keep it arms length by avoiding any of the proprietary features it offers. I use it exclusively as a JSON store which I feel I can easily export at any time if I wanted to switch to another NoSQL DBaaS.
A few people here are mentioning how it's crazy to depend on external services for an app, but as an 'indie' dev, I can't spend time maintaining a secure, high-availability database. Or a mail server when I can use SendGrid, or a logging platform when I can use Sentry, or any of the other service my app depends on.
Firebase is one of the very few products to offer controllable client data replication for full offline first functionality.
For apps that have significant offline requirements, this functionality can save a significant amount of time and significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and more importantly maintained.
One of my clients just recently seriously considered going with Firebase. The choice came down to Firebase and Couchbase, which has an even better offline functionality. After reading this post I am glad that we didn't going with Firebase.
Of course Couchbase has their own problems. The supported version of Couchbase is prohibitively expensive for small organizations and Couchbase themselves strongly recommended against deploying the community edition. (The community edition also artificially lags behind the supported edition 6 months. Couchbase even delays critical security fixes that same 6 months.)
Thanks for the kudos. The team works very hard to make the offline first capabilities best in class.
I'm not sure who at Couchbase is "strongly" recommending against the Community Edition. Of course we'd like to have people on the Enterprise Edition, but I think the information is out there to make an informed decision. You should only be getting a hard push away from CE if they really believe you'll need the support. Anyway, this is good feedback.
> A few people here are mentioning how it's crazy to depend on external services for an app, but as an 'indie' dev, I can't spend time maintaining a secure, high-availability database
Nobody is saying that you shouldn't rely on external services.
What's wrong on the other hand is to depend on a proprietary database offered by a single vendor.
Firebase is a proprietary database, which means you can't go to the competition without having to rewrite your application. It's called vendor lock-in. Plenty of SAAS provide MongoDB as a service and you can install MongoDB on your own machine, so if a SAAS is price gouging you, you can move to the competitor with a cheaper plan.
If you are not using Firebase ACL or Firebase realtime features then you shouldn't even be using Firebase at all. Don't use MongoDB either. Postgres provide JSON types and queries and most Postgres SAAS are much much cheaper than MongoDB SAAS.
I understand the convenience of not having to manage such product, but more often than not is way more cost effective to rent some dedicated servers and run infrastructure for fraction of the cost. It is fairly easy to create resilient infrastructure nowadays and hw failures are very rare anyways. People are being fooled by fancy menus to overpay a mile for mediocre service.
IMHO, the time needed to build and deploy your own thing using open-source and open protocols is well spent when compared to being at the mercy of BigPaasCorp when it comes to stuff like this.
A VM running nginx, an app in your language of choice, and postgres isn't that hard to setup -- and the costs and scaling of such is well understood.
Does AWS (or I guess maybe Azure) offer a Firebase alternative?
For an IRC style public chat app (the popular Firebase use case), is there a simple-to-use AWS solution that doesn't involve setting up the software/configuring it?
If not, then is setting up DeepStream on an AWS the best answer?
Serious question. Is there something available that can scale as easily?
Relatively new developer here- does anybody have any advice for someone who eventually wants to migrate a web app from Firebase to a custom server if I start to see good traction on the project? I was initially drawn to Firebase because I could iterate quickly, but now I'm not so sure if I should continue with them.
> 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.
Usually getting to the front page of Hacker News is the only way to get support from Google. Hope it works this time.
Couchbase Mobile is open source. Couchbase only provides the data platform, but is significantly more sophisticated at it than Firebase. Firebase offers many other services, so you can't really make a direct comparison. In simple terms, the way I think of it, Firebase goes wide, offering a package with many elements, while Couchbase goes deep on one area, the data platform. (FYI I work at Couchbase.)
>Always heavily consider open source alternatives (something which didn’t exist for Firebase at the time… but now alternatives like Horizon and Backendless exist, for example.
This is nothing new to me. I'm still working on my GAE/datastore migration...Price spikes, platform changes and deprecation are real risks when you use proprietary services/platforms.
I like GAE for low traffic websites. The free tier is quite generous, and can serve up a small business site (or 5), no problem. I run one for my personal site, and use it as a proxy to my home server.
Only problem is: You gotta play by their rules. The databases, in particular. Datastore was weird to get used to.
In general, you shouldn't use services which you don't understand completely, can debug, and have source code for if there're other options. I think that's why open source took over the world. It might seem to be more expensive, but in the end, it's a better option. Even if the service you use have a great support and fixes bugs instantaneously, it's better to have more control.
Firebase never made sense to me. I know nothing about web dev though. It seems like you are handing over your project to some nebulous entity and they can change the deal, stop updating or patching or raise the price. It seems better to simply build the whole project yourself.
James and team has done an absolutely amazing job with Firebase, very much a pioneer and industry leader. It makes me sad that Google then price gauges it.
I believe James is working on a solution/work-around for everybody, I chat with him occasionally and trust him, so I still encourage people to keep using Firebase. And that is coming from me (I work on gun, an OSS alternative with graphs that you can self host - https://github.com/amark/gun), so while I have an incentive to get people to use gun, I have to keep plugging Firebase because they are amazing (I don't say this about everyone, as I have said pretty harsh words about other database systems. But there are some that deserve legitimate respect, like Firebase, RethinkDB, and others).
They should have been monitoring the traffic within their infrastructure. I can understand rolling something out for a couple of months but two years is a bit excessive for this type of use case.
It's like going to a pump that counts two gallons as one for two years, pretend you don't know any better then have the nerve to ask the owner for a refund after the meter is fixed.
The price spike is dramatic... but is anyone actually surprised? Firebase is holding all the cards and users are expecting them to not play their hand. It's silly.
The solution is to build your own infrastructure. If you don't have the resources to do that, then find a lower-cost competitor.
> 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 unresponsive support and no hope when you have problems with any of their services. I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. (Edit: Yep, they recommend Stack Overflow, Quora, and then their Google Group.. lol. Some things never change)