24 ms·

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 t

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)

Aeolun 9y ago
Jup, had the same issue with Google App Engine. Luckily I could contact support... "What do you mean, you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!" Fun times.
- mosselman 9y ago
  "you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!" What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere? Would you recommend against using GAE?
  - mstade 9y ago
    > Would you recommend against using GAE? I've been burned so hard by them, I'd recommend against using anything Google.
    - Andrenid 9y ago
      It's getting to that point for me too now. I'm really really close to removing them from every aspect of my life. Professional and private.
      - bbcbasic 9y ago
        Gmail still rocks
        dkersten 9y ago
        I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!
        distances 9y ago
        FastMail is so much better than GMail. I don't know why I didn't change earlier.
        dkersten 9y ago
        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!
        mstade 9y ago
        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.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        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.
    - boubiyeah 9y ago
      Same here Marcus. 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.
    - mark_l_watson 9y ago
      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. So, for some applications, GCP works very well.
  - bontoJR 9y ago
    > What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere? 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...
  - Aeolun 9y ago
    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.
- grw_ 9y ago
  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.
- somewhatoff 9y ago
  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.
  - tscanausa 9y ago
    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.
    - geekme 9y ago
      Surprise there is a support team!
      - tajen 9y ago
        I've fallen again in this parallel universe where Google has a support team. How do you go back again? Ah, here it i—click
kuschku 9y ago
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. Very typical from Google.
- GFischer 9y ago
  Some individual Google employees are very helpful and open. Unfortunately Google as a company and their corporate practices are nothing like that.
  - solomatov 9y ago
    Some of their teams, for example tensorflow, are very very helpful.
    - dchichkov 9y ago
      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.
mstade 9y ago
> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences, but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'cloud compute' and their 'sql cloud' offering last year. It was a performance disaster; queries that were minor .1ms on localhost or in the same network were suddenly 18-20ms hitting google cloud. Spent a few days trying to dig in, and a few responses from various groups were "shouldn't be that slow" and "works for me" and that was about it. Gave up trying to get any real response from google (we may have got a 'looking in to it' response - I don't remember). Thing was, I knew going in it wasn't going to end well, I just wasn't sure exactly why (maybe that's just too cynical of a view, but I prefer 'realistic').
  - samastur 9y ago
    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.
  - elorant 9y ago
    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.
    - mgkimsal 9y ago
      But you KNOW going in - there's no support. You know this by 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/ 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.
dkersten 9y ago
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).
- bitexploder 9y ago
  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.
  - ioquatix 9y ago
    That sounds like a good way to ensure your access to every Google service gets permanently revoked.
    - bitexploder 9y ago
      Definitely scorched Earth style. There is precedent -- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seroundtable.com/amp/archives/019571.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seroundtable.com/amp/archiv... http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/213176 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/213176
      - ioquatix 9y ago
        That is so crazy. Sounds like Google really shot themselves in the foot on the PR front here. All over $700 USD.
    - lovich 9y ago
      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
Ygg2 9y ago
Google new motto - Speak to the Wall™
- oblio 9y ago
  Well, it sort of makes sense, Google is literally "speak to the wall". Isn't that what we do all day long while googling? We're no longer asking humans and asking questions to a "talking wall". For a funnier variant, https://lmgtfy.com/ https://lmgtfy.com/
- al_chemist 9y ago
  Isn't that motto registered by Facebook?
  - Ygg2 9y ago
    No, that's - FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU™
  - djrogers 9y ago
    No, that's 'the walls have ears - ours!'
corford 9y ago
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.
- daemin 9y ago
  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.
  - douche 9y ago
    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.
    - corford 9y ago
      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).
  - 9y ago
snomad 9y ago
> 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.
- mwexler 9y ago
  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?
  - alexbeloi 9y ago
    >Is there a certain size of vendor or price point where we expect to have human support and an SLA for response? Yes, when they control the switch that can kill your business.
- scardine 9y ago
  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. Disclaimer: I run a G Suite reseller operation
kelvin0 9y ago
Well of course they would charge that much: their customer support is stellar but it comes at a cost ... Errrrrrr ;)
alwan 9y ago
Google support team is a python scripts. You cannot call someone and get real help.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Project Fi support is good, I got a human who solved my problem in less than 5 minutes. Also AdSense, but there's obvious reasons they support that.
  - tomascot 9y ago
    Adwords, actually
welpwelp 9y ago
Oh I'm glad my Google App Engine service never became popular!
- pawadu 9y ago
  Not? Sure it is not as big as AWS or Azure but I think they are number 3 or 4.
  - nilved 9y ago
    You misread their comment
solomatov 9y ago
On the other hand, I am working with tensorflow now, and they reply on stackoverflow within a day, which is really great.
snarf21 9y ago
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.

Aeolun 9y ago

Jup, had the same issue with Google App Engine. Luckily I could contact support... "What do you mean, you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!" Fun times.

mosselman 9y ago
"you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!" What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere? Would you recommend against using GAE?
- mstade 9y ago
  > Would you recommend against using GAE? I've been burned so hard by them, I'd recommend against using anything Google.
  - Andrenid 9y ago
    It's getting to that point for me too now. I'm really really close to removing them from every aspect of my life. Professional and private.
    - bbcbasic 9y ago
      Gmail still rocks
      - dkersten 9y ago
        I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!
        distances 9y ago
        FastMail is so much better than GMail. I don't know why I didn't change earlier.
        dkersten 9y ago
        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!
        mstade 9y ago
        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.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        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.
  - boubiyeah 9y ago
    Same here Marcus. 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.
  - mark_l_watson 9y ago
    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. So, for some applications, GCP works very well.
- bontoJR 9y ago
  > What? Seriously? Is this documented anywhere? 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...
- Aeolun 9y ago
  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.
grw_ 9y ago
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.
somewhatoff 9y ago
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.
- tscanausa 9y ago
  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.
  - geekme 9y ago
    Surprise there is a support team!
    - tajen 9y ago
      I've fallen again in this parallel universe where Google has a support team. How do you go back again? Ah, here it i—click

kuschku 9y ago

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. Very typical from Google.

GFischer 9y ago
Some individual Google employees are very helpful and open. Unfortunately Google as a company and their corporate practices are nothing like that.
- solomatov 9y ago
  Some of their teams, for example tensorflow, are very very helpful.
  - dchichkov 9y ago
    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.

mstade 9y ago

> I bet they also have a "community" support forum or Google Group full of helpless people talking to a virtual wall. This is Google support summed up perfectly in a single sentence. It really is appalling.

mgkimsal 9y ago
> It really is appalling Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences, but those were exceptions, not the rule. I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'cloud compute' and their 'sql cloud' offering last year. It was a performance disaster; queries that were minor .1ms on localhost or in the same network were suddenly 18-20ms hitting google cloud. Spent a few days trying to dig in, and a few responses from various groups were "shouldn't be that slow" and "works for me" and that was about it. Gave up trying to get any real response from google (we may have got a 'looking in to it' response - I don't remember). Thing was, I knew going in it wasn't going to end well, I just wasn't sure exactly why (maybe that's just too cynical of a view, but I prefer 'realistic').
- samastur 9y ago
  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.
- elorant 9y ago
  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.
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    But you KNOW going in - there's no support. You know this by 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/ 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.

dkersten 9y ago

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).

bitexploder 9y ago
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.
- ioquatix 9y ago
  That sounds like a good way to ensure your access to every Google service gets permanently revoked.
  - bitexploder 9y ago
    Definitely scorched Earth style. There is precedent -- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seroundtable.com/amp/archives/019571.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seroundtable.com/amp/archiv... http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/213176 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/213176
    - ioquatix 9y ago
      That is so crazy. Sounds like Google really shot themselves in the foot on the PR front here. All over $700 USD.
  - lovich 9y ago
    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

Ygg2 9y ago

Google new motto - Speak to the Wall™

oblio 9y ago
Well, it sort of makes sense, Google is literally "speak to the wall". Isn't that what we do all day long while googling? We're no longer asking humans and asking questions to a "talking wall". For a funnier variant, https://lmgtfy.com/ https://lmgtfy.com/
al_chemist 9y ago
Isn't that motto registered by Facebook?
- Ygg2 9y ago
  No, that's - FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU™
- djrogers 9y ago
  No, that's 'the walls have ears - ours!'

corford 9y ago

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.

daemin 9y ago
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.
- douche 9y ago
  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.
  - corford 9y ago
    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).
- 9y ago

snomad 9y ago

> 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.

mwexler 9y ago
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?
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  >Is there a certain size of vendor or price point where we expect to have human support and an SLA for response? Yes, when they control the switch that can kill your business.
scardine 9y ago
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. Disclaimer: I run a G Suite reseller operation

kelvin0 9y ago

Well of course they would charge that much: their customer support is stellar but it comes at a cost ... Errrrrrr ;)

alwan 9y ago

Google support team is a python scripts. You cannot call someone and get real help.

ReverseCold 9y ago
Project Fi support is good, I got a human who solved my problem in less than 5 minutes. Also AdSense, but there's obvious reasons they support that.
- tomascot 9y ago
  Adwords, actually

welpwelp 9y ago

Oh I'm glad my Google App Engine service never became popular!

pawadu 9y ago
Not? Sure it is not as big as AWS or Azure but I think they are number 3 or 4.
- nilved 9y ago
  You misread their comment

solomatov 9y ago

On the other hand, I am working with tensorflow now, and they reply on stackoverflow within a day, which is really great.

snarf21 9y ago

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.