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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 th

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.

Mithaldu 9y ago
Absolutely no shame on the author for something that can be easily overlooked, wasn't documented and not reported by any tool.
- yunolisten 9y ago
  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.
awjr 9y ago
Be very careful here. The developer may not have used TLS BUT any failed authorisation attempts are also counted in the bandwidth. So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials.
- yunolisten 9y ago
  > So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials. You could argue that for pretty much anything being hosted, anywhere.
  - stemuk 9y ago
    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).
    - yunolisten 9y ago
      > 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.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        No. Most self-hosted services have no bandwidth costs, at all. Or they have bandwidth costs around a dollar per terabyte. Which, even when maxing your connections, would always be below your actual server costs.
        yunolisten 9y ago
        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
        kuschku 9y ago
        Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling. I’ve read the fine print, and called them. Online, Scaleway, OVH, do not ever throttle you. Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.
        yunolisten 9y ago
        > 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.

Mithaldu 9y ago

Absolutely no shame on the author for something that can be easily overlooked, wasn't documented and not reported by any tool.

yunolisten 9y ago
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.

awjr 9y ago

Be very careful here. The developer may not have used TLS BUT any failed authorisation attempts are also counted in the bandwidth. So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials.

yunolisten 9y ago
> So a bot net could absolutely wreck your credit card by just repeatedly trying to access your API with invalid credentials. You could argue that for pretty much anything being hosted, anywhere.
- stemuk 9y ago
  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).
  - yunolisten 9y ago
    > 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.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      No. Most self-hosted services have no bandwidth costs, at all. Or they have bandwidth costs around a dollar per terabyte. Which, even when maxing your connections, would always be below your actual server costs.
      - yunolisten 9y ago
        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
        kuschku 9y ago
        Dude, I’ve used 180 TB of traffic in one month on a 16$/mo server, and still, no throttling. I’ve read the fine print, and called them. Online, Scaleway, OVH, do not ever throttle you. Hetzner requires you to buy traffic, but there it costs 1$ per 1TB of traffic, which is 1000x cheaper than Firebase.
        yunolisten 9y ago
        > 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.