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I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons: - No way

I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons: - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. - The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of the whole ecosystem. I depend on Google for both Gmail and Android, so being locked out would be a disaster. To use Google Cloud, I'd basically need to migrate out of Google in other places, which is a huge initial cost. Both of those are basically risks. I'd much rather overpay $20-50/month than having a small risk of having to pay $100k or being locked out of Gmail/my phone. I cannot have a $100k bill to pay, it'd destroy everything I have. Also I haven't needed it so far. I've had a Node.js project on the front page of HN, with 100k+ visits, and the Heroku hobby server used 30% of the CPU with peaks at 50%. Trying to do the software decently does pay off.

unexaminedlife 7y ago
I just did some math on their calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ I think some folks may be overestimating their ability to put a dent in Google's infrastructure. 1 CPU 2GB memory 80 concurrent requests per container instance 1000ms execution time per request 5kb outbound network bandwidth per request 100 million requests per month $120.19 per month What if we bump it up to 100kb per request? In my experience only initial requests end up being enormous, especially in single page apps. But to be fair some folks may not have time to optimize. That still only brings the monthly bill to $1,071.48 Then again that second estimate probably isn't relevant since I typically host my static data on a CDN.
- starptech 7y ago
  Your setup is unrealistic. 100 million requests per month with 80 concurrent requests?. 1000 $ is cheap if you try to run wikipedia.com fully managed.
  - unexaminedlife 7y ago
    A lot of web stacks optimize for concurrency. Based on 2GB memory, which ends up being ~25MB per request (which for me is extremely high), I don't see it as being unrealistic. Especially for the use case I'm considering. Typically the only reason these boxes exist is to allow a web browser to gain access to data in a database, so most of the 1000ms per request wouldn't be spent in CPU, it will be spent waiting for the database to return a response.
- franciscop 7y ago
  I'm not from the US, and the thought of "only" paying $1071/m for a side project which is most likely not generating revenue is mindblowing. If you give me $1071-$120 = $951/month forever for optimizing an app once I'll optimize it for you :)
  - unexaminedlife 7y ago
    I can't say it's "only" $1071/month. I definitely wouldn't go broke because of it though. Especially if it's only a side project I probably would look for ways to reduce cost for subsequent months. I don't know how optimizing comes into the equation. The app you build and deploy to Google Run leverages their infrastructure. A fiber optic cross (with just one telecommunications company) connect would cost probably close to $1000/month alone, but Google is probably peered with every telecommunications company in the entire world, and they don't have just one fiber optic line connecting to each of them. So, it's not really a one-time optimization when you put your work on Google. It's like I would be paying Google $1071 to rent the infrastructure of their entire network to receive and distribute data in my name.
- chewz 7y ago
  Silly me I have last week made an infinite loop on Firestore - update to document triggered CloudFunction which updated document and Firestore is fast.. In just minutes I had passed free quota and here I have been lucky because I have checked console. If I have left that version (and I have been sure it is just innocent commit) for a few hours running I would be up for a surprise.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Just loading the Javascript for a basic React app is way over 100kb though.
  - zebnyc 7y ago
    Wouldn't it be better to do that over S3 / cloud storage? And would be much smaller once minified and compressed
  - onion2k 7y ago
    It's 6kb for React and 25kb for React-DOM if you do a production build. Still a lot in terms of JS, but not quite as much as you're saying.
redis_mlc 7y ago
> I cannot have a $100k bill to pay, it'd destroy everything I have. Welcome to US healthcare. Happens daily! :)
- franciscop 7y ago
  I'm not in the US, and would not dream of going there without health insurance.
  - Can_Not 7y ago
    Happens even with insurance.
    - gnopgnip 7y ago
      The max out of pocket is about $8k under the ACA. That is a lot of money for a lot of people, but it isn't nearly $100k
      - ianleeclark 7y ago
        There are a bunch of costs that could increase this number: having to deal with networks, having an emergency and having the max amount for a procedure exceeded, and, in some cases, your deductible.
        gnopgnip 7y ago
        Your deductible counts towards the out of pocket max
- znpy 7y ago
  That makes me happy to be an European
joshvm 7y ago
You can set up alerts if you exceed a budget, and you can program a response to turn off billing on a project. Google has a guide for doing exactly what you want. It's not a particularly clean fix, but it is fairly easy (copy paste) and can be done. It also allows for fine grain control eg you could kill an expensive backend process but keep the fronted running. You can also rate limit some APIs. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... > You might cap costs because you have a hard limit on how much money you can spend on Google Cloud. This is typical for students, researchers, or developers working in sandbox environments. In these cases you want to stop the spending and might be willing to shutdown all your Google Cloud services and usage when your budget limit is reached.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  Is this not typical for...literally every use case? No one has an unlimited budget.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Depends - if your profits increase in line with your expenses, you might be raking in the ad revenue/views/sales/whatever because your product 'went viral' and you might prefer to keep it up. Or if the rise in costs is something you can mitigate on your end - such as a bad deployment - you might want time to respond yourself, rather than your site going offline. More generally, few site reliability engineers are looking to add extra ways for the site to be taken offline. Of course, if you're large enough to be in those situations, your round-the-clock operations staff will be monitoring the billing situation as carefully as they monitor page load times and error rates and database load so an unexpected bill will be very unlikely.
    - gdxhyrd 7y ago
      > few site reliability engineers are looking to add extra ways for the site to be taken offline If your company has anything close to "reliability engineers", then you already have legal and finance teams too that can sort terms out. The discussion is about companies that do not even have departments to begin with.
deleted 7y ago
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fearface 7y ago
Why not just make another Google Account just for this project? It’s what I do since year, basically for every customer I work, I create a new account and even share the credentials with the customer (if he wants it).
- tamrix 7y ago
  It's against the ToS to create another account to circumvate a ban.
- zwily 7y ago
  I’ve heard about Google correlating these accounts (through billing methods, contact methods, access patterns) and banning them together when one infringes on something. I’m not sure it’s the protection you think it is.
  - sdan 7y ago
    Yes they do. If you want to bypass these rules, just make a ton of accounts and wait for a couple months and the use those accounts with whatever credit card you have (keep in mind that you should get another card from your bank because google can tell when your card is a generated one like privacy.com)
    - mcintyre1994 7y ago
      Won’t they just correlate the name and address on your different credit cards?
      - sdan 7y ago
        I don't recall ever giving my real name/address for any billing address/name, because most if not all the time, they don't really care (or at least I never seen a difference).
- C14L 7y ago
  All those accounts are "related". Made from the same PC, used from the same phone, etc.
matsz 7y ago
Cloud hosting is great for businesses, that's why I believe that every web developer should experiment with those services. It's not great for personal use for the reasons you've stated - the risk of your service going down due to it being viral is much easier to bear than the risk of having to pay outrageous amounts of money for those services in that event. If your hobby project goes down for a while nobody will remember that and having to pay $100k will make you remember that for an eternity.
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.
  - jon-wood 7y ago
    I’ve seen surprise bills not far off that, not from a viral hit, but from bugs in the firmware for connected devices which suddenly switched them from taking 1 action/10 minutes to 1 action/3 seconds. Needless to say firmware QA has become much more focused since that incident.
  - matsz 7y ago
    You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.
  - franciscop 7y ago
    60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page. Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk. Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.
deleted 7y ago
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cheriot 7y ago
From the article: > The service will create more and more instances of your application up to the limit you defined The Cloud Run docs confirm an instance maximum can be set and the price per instance can be less than $5/month.
- franciscop 7y ago
  Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search: https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.
  - cheriot 7y ago
    I hope GCP/AWS add a max spend ability. Until then it's complexity of pricing model vs time spent on OS and database management. To each their own.
    - savrajsingh 7y ago
      You can definitely set limits on GCP
    - franciscop 7y ago
      I use Heroku for these situations where everything is managed automatically. The only con here would be paying more, $20-50/m (Node.js+DB+Redis?) instead of $5/m for DO, but I'm happy to pay for that and spend no time on manual management.
    - misterhtmlcss 7y ago
      It's why I'm on digital ocean. Cheap, but good quality service that's comparable to the big boys and it's capped. $5/month is perfect for me
      - 7y ago
C14L 7y ago
> The risk of being locked out For me, this is the main reason I try not to use any Google products, except for Gmail and Android. For mail, I started to migrate away from Google to reduce risk of being locked out.
swiley 7y ago
> No way of limiting the expenses This pattern seems common among business people: things working in the common case vs things working in corner cases, it’s how you end up with consumer windows running critical machines. I’m always shocked and moderately disturbed when I see it but I guess we all need to accept the reality that most people are very pragmatic. It makes sense, most people’s intuition comes from “the real material world” where you have to pragmatic, I think many of them fail to realize that on a computer you don’t have to give up certainty the way you do in “the real world.”
- kevan 7y ago
  Loss aversion[1] describes the phenomenon pretty well: > Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains: for an organism operating close to the edge of survival, the loss of a day's food could cause death, whereas the gain of an extra day's food would not cause an extra day of life (unless the food could be easily and effectively stored). For lots of companies an accidental over-use of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is an annoyance, but for a single person that could bankrupt them. I generally avoid programmatically interacting with cloud providers on my own time for exactly this reason. One mistake in a loop can get expensive fast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
  - swiley 7y ago
    That's not quite what I'm describing, it's more like how people will ignore git error messages and randomly fiddling with things thinking "that's just how it is and I can't understand it" rather than figuring out what's actually broken.
deanmoriarty 7y ago
I had the same thoughts: even if I like Google Cloud a lot (I use it extensively at work), I don’t feel it’s safe for me to use it at home, since I don’t want to risk having my entire google account locked due to “suspicious activity”, whatever that might mean. In fact, I recently shut down a personal App Engine service I had been using for myself for a few years just because of this paranoia. The service was not doing anything illegal, just crawling a few websites (forums, ...) I like and sending me emails when there are interesting updates. But you never know if they might determine my outbound traffic is suspicious. I also started the long process of moving my main email from a @gmail.com to a @custom.domain that currently forwards to gmail, just in case I get locked out. It is quite bizzarre that this is the reputation google gained for themselves.
- irq-1 7y ago
  I ordered a phone from Google that's been lost in delivery. I have Gmail/documents/photos/music... Should I do a charge-back? Sue them in small claims court? I should never have done business with them.
  - smt88 7y ago
    Absolutely don't do a chargeback. Try to settle it with the package carrier. Google's algorithm can flag a chargeback as suspicious, leading you to be locked out.
    - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
      This is a delightfully horrifying response... "Don't poke the trillion dollar bear, he might bite you and lock you out of your account!" (GOOG's market cap as I write this is $985B...)
      - smt88 7y ago
        It is horrifying and it should be illegal to provide so little customer service when you encourage deep, irreplaceable investments into your platform.
gradschool 7y ago
I agree about being too scared to do business with Google. FWIW, I have a project that monitors an AWS S3 hosted web site every minute and takes it down if the charges exceed a quota. It ends up costing me 44 cents a month to run it as a lambda function but I think of it as insurance. Pull requests are welcome from whoever understands Terraform better than me because I couldn't figure out how to automate everything about the deployment. https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota
tachyonbeam 7y ago
> I'd much rather overpay $20-50/month I don't think the alternatives are nearly that expensive. Vultr, DigitalOcean and others have virtual private servers for only $5 per month. They're small instances but totally fine for side-projects. I run a cheap $5/month VPS and it was able to withstand my project making the HN front page without issues. I don't use Google cloud hosting for the same reasons as you, I don't want to have too many eggs in one basket.
- goostavos 7y ago
  +1 to just running something on a cheap Digital Ocean style box. In our modern cloud age, I think we've forgotten how much a single box can actually handle (and how few of us actually _need_ to "scale" from day one). Hacker News front page isn't really that much traffic in the grand scheme of things. My $5 DO instance handled it without a sweat. Hell, even "real" projects can still work under this approach. A $20/mo DO box, sqlite, and a few shell scripts can get you shockingly far ^_^
  - freehunter 7y ago
    A few years ago I set up a $5 DO droplet with the Dokku image they provide. Years later it's still running all of my side projects in production, even though I moved from the $5/mo plan to the $20/mo plan as my business grew and my needs increased. I have 15 containers connected to 10 Postgres instances running right now handling tens of thousands of views per month for $20/mo, AND I have Heroku-like convenience to deploy with a "git push dokku master", without having to pay a minimum of $7/mo for each app I deploy. I can deploy a new app at no extra cost Sure, I have to patch my own OS (minimal effort but still effort) and backups/DR/HA is on me to provide, so it might not be for everyone. But I have a mantra that all my side projects combined need to be able to pay for all my side projects combined to keep me from spending too much, so keeping costs low is important. And that $20/mo would be over $100/mo on Heroku. For me it was a no-brainer. One low-revenue side project pays the bills for all my just-for-fun projects.
    - awb 7y ago
alchemism 7y ago
> The risk of being locked out. It is a best-practice to have a GSuite account instead of a consumer-grade Gmail account to manage an associated GCP account. It is a bit onerous for a hobbyist, admittedly. But if its anything more ambitious than that, do you _really_ want Google scraping the contents of your email while you build the Next Great Thing? Try not to use a consumer account.
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nnx 7y ago
> - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. It's surprising that no major cloud provide prepaid option, which would be handy for such.
nine_k 7y ago
If I were to run any public-facing protect on Google Cloud, I definitely would use a separate account, created just for that. You never knows what might happen to that account. I thought everybody does this. I wonder how hard would it be to run a script that checks your balance e.g. every 15 minutes, and shuts down public access to your services when a certain threshold is triggered. I wonder if a ready-made service for that exists in cloud providers' offerings.
- erdemozg 7y ago
  Google somehow is able to link your newly created account to your personal/regular account. So if you some shady stuff with the new account, your other account is at risk of being locked out, too.
  - zaphirplane 7y ago
    Has anyone gone down an account per side project and not gotten into a problem? And is there a warning before the banning sledge hammer falls
estoniandwarf 7y ago
Why not make a burner gmail instead of migrating out of Google
- GFischer 7y ago
  Google can (and frequently does) link burner gmail accounts with your real e-mail account.
rocho 7y ago
These are really non issues. You can create a new Google account and setup a limit for the number of instances and alerts. Also, show us how you would rack up a $100k bill for a side project that receives a traffic spike. It's simply not realistic.
- onion2k 7y ago
  I don't know how I would get a $100k bill from a spike. That ignorance is enough for me to avoid using the service - unless I know how the billing works, what my maximum monthly bill is going to be (with a hard limit that cannot be crossed), and exactly where all the gotchas are then I won't use the platform. Auto-scaling magic is lovely in theory, but in practise it is hard. Annecdata - a video streaming startup here in Newcastle that enabled DJs to stream live sets was used to illegally stream some football games. The subsequent bandwidth bill killed the startup. Yes, they got some things wrong with their tech, and security, but that's the danger that put's people off using "clever" services.
dickjocke 7y ago
Wow is the ban thing a real risk that anyone can substantiate? That's horrifying and I had the same thought that everyone else did about using a burner email, which is apparently impossible. Personally I don't think I can go straight up Heroku or DO because I like things like firestore/dynamo, S3, etc etc. But this is pushing me to move everything I do over to AWS. The only thing is I am very comfortable in GCP, so that would kind of suck. bleh.
Mohune 7y ago
What if you use a different google account only for this?

unexaminedlife 7y ago

I just did some math on their calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ I think some folks may be overestimating their ability to put a dent in Google's infrastructure. 1 CPU 2GB memory 80 concurrent requests per container instance 1000ms execution time per request 5kb outbound network bandwidth per request 100 million requests per month $120.19 per month What if we bump it up to 100kb per request? In my experience only initial requests end up being enormous, especially in single page apps. But to be fair some folks may not have time to optimize. That still only brings the monthly bill to $1,071.48 Then again that second estimate probably isn't relevant since I typically host my static data on a CDN.

starptech 7y ago
Your setup is unrealistic. 100 million requests per month with 80 concurrent requests?. 1000 $ is cheap if you try to run wikipedia.com fully managed.
- unexaminedlife 7y ago
  A lot of web stacks optimize for concurrency. Based on 2GB memory, which ends up being ~25MB per request (which for me is extremely high), I don't see it as being unrealistic. Especially for the use case I'm considering. Typically the only reason these boxes exist is to allow a web browser to gain access to data in a database, so most of the 1000ms per request wouldn't be spent in CPU, it will be spent waiting for the database to return a response.
franciscop 7y ago
I'm not from the US, and the thought of "only" paying $1071/m for a side project which is most likely not generating revenue is mindblowing. If you give me $1071-$120 = $951/month forever for optimizing an app once I'll optimize it for you :)
- unexaminedlife 7y ago
  I can't say it's "only" $1071/month. I definitely wouldn't go broke because of it though. Especially if it's only a side project I probably would look for ways to reduce cost for subsequent months. I don't know how optimizing comes into the equation. The app you build and deploy to Google Run leverages their infrastructure. A fiber optic cross (with just one telecommunications company) connect would cost probably close to $1000/month alone, but Google is probably peered with every telecommunications company in the entire world, and they don't have just one fiber optic line connecting to each of them. So, it's not really a one-time optimization when you put your work on Google. It's like I would be paying Google $1071 to rent the infrastructure of their entire network to receive and distribute data in my name.
chewz 7y ago
Silly me I have last week made an infinite loop on Firestore - update to document triggered CloudFunction which updated document and Firestore is fast.. In just minutes I had passed free quota and here I have been lucky because I have checked console. If I have left that version (and I have been sure it is just innocent commit) for a few hours running I would be up for a surprise.
Aeolun 7y ago
Just loading the Javascript for a basic React app is way over 100kb though.
- zebnyc 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be better to do that over S3 / cloud storage? And would be much smaller once minified and compressed
- onion2k 7y ago
  It's 6kb for React and 25kb for React-DOM if you do a production build. Still a lot in terms of JS, but not quite as much as you're saying.

redis_mlc 7y ago

> I cannot have a $100k bill to pay, it'd destroy everything I have. Welcome to US healthcare. Happens daily! :)

franciscop 7y ago
I'm not in the US, and would not dream of going there without health insurance.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  Happens even with insurance.
  - gnopgnip 7y ago
    The max out of pocket is about $8k under the ACA. That is a lot of money for a lot of people, but it isn't nearly $100k
    - ianleeclark 7y ago
      There are a bunch of costs that could increase this number: having to deal with networks, having an emergency and having the max amount for a procedure exceeded, and, in some cases, your deductible.
      - gnopgnip 7y ago
        Your deductible counts towards the out of pocket max
znpy 7y ago
That makes me happy to be an European

joshvm 7y ago

You can set up alerts if you exceed a budget, and you can program a response to turn off billing on a project. Google has a guide for doing exactly what you want. It's not a particularly clean fix, but it is fairly easy (copy paste) and can be done. It also allows for fine grain control eg you could kill an expensive backend process but keep the fronted running. You can also rate limit some APIs. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... > You might cap costs because you have a hard limit on how much money you can spend on Google Cloud. This is typical for students, researchers, or developers working in sandbox environments. In these cases you want to stop the spending and might be willing to shutdown all your Google Cloud services and usage when your budget limit is reached.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
Is this not typical for...literally every use case? No one has an unlimited budget.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Depends - if your profits increase in line with your expenses, you might be raking in the ad revenue/views/sales/whatever because your product 'went viral' and you might prefer to keep it up. Or if the rise in costs is something you can mitigate on your end - such as a bad deployment - you might want time to respond yourself, rather than your site going offline. More generally, few site reliability engineers are looking to add extra ways for the site to be taken offline. Of course, if you're large enough to be in those situations, your round-the-clock operations staff will be monitoring the billing situation as carefully as they monitor page load times and error rates and database load so an unexpected bill will be very unlikely.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    > few site reliability engineers are looking to add extra ways for the site to be taken offline If your company has anything close to "reliability engineers", then you already have legal and finance teams too that can sort terms out. The discussion is about companies that do not even have departments to begin with.

deleted 7y ago

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fearface 7y ago

Why not just make another Google Account just for this project? It’s what I do since year, basically for every customer I work, I create a new account and even share the credentials with the customer (if he wants it).

tamrix 7y ago
It's against the ToS to create another account to circumvate a ban.
zwily 7y ago
I’ve heard about Google correlating these accounts (through billing methods, contact methods, access patterns) and banning them together when one infringes on something. I’m not sure it’s the protection you think it is.
- sdan 7y ago
  Yes they do. If you want to bypass these rules, just make a ton of accounts and wait for a couple months and the use those accounts with whatever credit card you have (keep in mind that you should get another card from your bank because google can tell when your card is a generated one like privacy.com)
  - mcintyre1994 7y ago
    Won’t they just correlate the name and address on your different credit cards?
    - sdan 7y ago
      I don't recall ever giving my real name/address for any billing address/name, because most if not all the time, they don't really care (or at least I never seen a difference).
C14L 7y ago
All those accounts are "related". Made from the same PC, used from the same phone, etc.

matsz 7y ago

Cloud hosting is great for businesses, that's why I believe that every web developer should experiment with those services. It's not great for personal use for the reasons you've stated - the risk of your service going down due to it being viral is much easier to bear than the risk of having to pay outrageous amounts of money for those services in that event. If your hobby project goes down for a while nobody will remember that and having to pay $100k will make you remember that for an eternity.

abootstrapper 7y ago
Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.
- jon-wood 7y ago
  I’ve seen surprise bills not far off that, not from a viral hit, but from bugs in the firmware for connected devices which suddenly switched them from taking 1 action/10 minutes to 1 action/3 seconds. Needless to say firmware QA has become much more focused since that incident.
- matsz 7y ago
  You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.
- franciscop 7y ago
  60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page. Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk. Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.

deleted 7y ago

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cheriot 7y ago

From the article: > The service will create more and more instances of your application up to the limit you defined The Cloud Run docs confirm an instance maximum can be set and the price per instance can be less than $5/month.

franciscop 7y ago
Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search: https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.
- cheriot 7y ago
  I hope GCP/AWS add a max spend ability. Until then it's complexity of pricing model vs time spent on OS and database management. To each their own.
  - savrajsingh 7y ago
    You can definitely set limits on GCP
  - franciscop 7y ago
    I use Heroku for these situations where everything is managed automatically. The only con here would be paying more, $20-50/m (Node.js+DB+Redis?) instead of $5/m for DO, but I'm happy to pay for that and spend no time on manual management.
  - misterhtmlcss 7y ago
    It's why I'm on digital ocean. Cheap, but good quality service that's comparable to the big boys and it's capped. $5/month is perfect for me
    - 7y ago

C14L 7y ago

> The risk of being locked out For me, this is the main reason I try not to use any Google products, except for Gmail and Android. For mail, I started to migrate away from Google to reduce risk of being locked out.

swiley 7y ago

> No way of limiting the expenses This pattern seems common among business people: things working in the common case vs things working in corner cases, it’s how you end up with consumer windows running critical machines. I’m always shocked and moderately disturbed when I see it but I guess we all need to accept the reality that most people are very pragmatic. It makes sense, most people’s intuition comes from “the real material world” where you have to pragmatic, I think many of them fail to realize that on a computer you don’t have to give up certainty the way you do in “the real world.”

kevan 7y ago
Loss aversion[1] describes the phenomenon pretty well: > Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains: for an organism operating close to the edge of survival, the loss of a day's food could cause death, whereas the gain of an extra day's food would not cause an extra day of life (unless the food could be easily and effectively stored). For lots of companies an accidental over-use of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is an annoyance, but for a single person that could bankrupt them. I generally avoid programmatically interacting with cloud providers on my own time for exactly this reason. One mistake in a loop can get expensive fast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
- swiley 7y ago
  That's not quite what I'm describing, it's more like how people will ignore git error messages and randomly fiddling with things thinking "that's just how it is and I can't understand it" rather than figuring out what's actually broken.

deanmoriarty 7y ago

I had the same thoughts: even if I like Google Cloud a lot (I use it extensively at work), I don’t feel it’s safe for me to use it at home, since I don’t want to risk having my entire google account locked due to “suspicious activity”, whatever that might mean. In fact, I recently shut down a personal App Engine service I had been using for myself for a few years just because of this paranoia. The service was not doing anything illegal, just crawling a few websites (forums, ...) I like and sending me emails when there are interesting updates. But you never know if they might determine my outbound traffic is suspicious. I also started the long process of moving my main email from a @gmail.com to a @custom.domain that currently forwards to gmail, just in case I get locked out. It is quite bizzarre that this is the reputation google gained for themselves.

irq-1 7y ago
I ordered a phone from Google that's been lost in delivery. I have Gmail/documents/photos/music... Should I do a charge-back? Sue them in small claims court? I should never have done business with them.
- smt88 7y ago
  Absolutely don't do a chargeback. Try to settle it with the package carrier. Google's algorithm can flag a chargeback as suspicious, leading you to be locked out.
  - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    This is a delightfully horrifying response... "Don't poke the trillion dollar bear, he might bite you and lock you out of your account!" (GOOG's market cap as I write this is $985B...)
    - smt88 7y ago
      It is horrifying and it should be illegal to provide so little customer service when you encourage deep, irreplaceable investments into your platform.

gradschool 7y ago

I agree about being too scared to do business with Google. FWIW, I have a project that monitors an AWS S3 hosted web site every minute and takes it down if the charges exceed a quota. It ends up costing me 44 cents a month to run it as a lambda function but I think of it as insurance. Pull requests are welcome from whoever understands Terraform better than me because I couldn't figure out how to automate everything about the deployment. https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota

tachyonbeam 7y ago

> I'd much rather overpay $20-50/month I don't think the alternatives are nearly that expensive. Vultr, DigitalOcean and others have virtual private servers for only $5 per month. They're small instances but totally fine for side-projects. I run a cheap $5/month VPS and it was able to withstand my project making the HN front page without issues. I don't use Google cloud hosting for the same reasons as you, I don't want to have too many eggs in one basket.

goostavos 7y ago
+1 to just running something on a cheap Digital Ocean style box. In our modern cloud age, I think we've forgotten how much a single box can actually handle (and how few of us actually _need_ to "scale" from day one). Hacker News front page isn't really that much traffic in the grand scheme of things. My $5 DO instance handled it without a sweat. Hell, even "real" projects can still work under this approach. A $20/mo DO box, sqlite, and a few shell scripts can get you shockingly far ^_^
- freehunter 7y ago
  A few years ago I set up a $5 DO droplet with the Dokku image they provide. Years later it's still running all of my side projects in production, even though I moved from the $5/mo plan to the $20/mo plan as my business grew and my needs increased. I have 15 containers connected to 10 Postgres instances running right now handling tens of thousands of views per month for $20/mo, AND I have Heroku-like convenience to deploy with a "git push dokku master", without having to pay a minimum of $7/mo for each app I deploy. I can deploy a new app at no extra cost Sure, I have to patch my own OS (minimal effort but still effort) and backups/DR/HA is on me to provide, so it might not be for everyone. But I have a mantra that all my side projects combined need to be able to pay for all my side projects combined to keep me from spending too much, so keeping costs low is important. And that $20/mo would be over $100/mo on Heroku. For me it was a no-brainer. One low-revenue side project pays the bills for all my just-for-fun projects.
  - awb 7y ago

alchemism 7y ago

> The risk of being locked out. It is a best-practice to have a GSuite account instead of a consumer-grade Gmail account to manage an associated GCP account. It is a bit onerous for a hobbyist, admittedly. But if its anything more ambitious than that, do you _really_ want Google scraping the contents of your email while you build the Next Great Thing? Try not to use a consumer account.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nnx 7y ago

> - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. It's surprising that no major cloud provide prepaid option, which would be handy for such.

nine_k 7y ago

If I were to run any public-facing protect on Google Cloud, I definitely would use a separate account, created just for that. You never knows what might happen to that account. I thought everybody does this. I wonder how hard would it be to run a script that checks your balance e.g. every 15 minutes, and shuts down public access to your services when a certain threshold is triggered. I wonder if a ready-made service for that exists in cloud providers' offerings.

erdemozg 7y ago
Google somehow is able to link your newly created account to your personal/regular account. So if you some shady stuff with the new account, your other account is at risk of being locked out, too.
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  Has anyone gone down an account per side project and not gotten into a problem? And is there a warning before the banning sledge hammer falls

estoniandwarf 7y ago

Why not make a burner gmail instead of migrating out of Google

GFischer 7y ago
Google can (and frequently does) link burner gmail accounts with your real e-mail account.

rocho 7y ago

These are really non issues. You can create a new Google account and setup a limit for the number of instances and alerts. Also, show us how you would rack up a $100k bill for a side project that receives a traffic spike. It's simply not realistic.

onion2k 7y ago
I don't know how I would get a $100k bill from a spike. That ignorance is enough for me to avoid using the service - unless I know how the billing works, what my maximum monthly bill is going to be (with a hard limit that cannot be crossed), and exactly where all the gotchas are then I won't use the platform. Auto-scaling magic is lovely in theory, but in practise it is hard. Annecdata - a video streaming startup here in Newcastle that enabled DJs to stream live sets was used to illegally stream some football games. The subsequent bandwidth bill killed the startup. Yes, they got some things wrong with their tech, and security, but that's the danger that put's people off using "clever" services.

dickjocke 7y ago

Wow is the ban thing a real risk that anyone can substantiate? That's horrifying and I had the same thought that everyone else did about using a burner email, which is apparently impossible. Personally I don't think I can go straight up Heroku or DO because I like things like firestore/dynamo, S3, etc etc. But this is pushing me to move everything I do over to AWS. The only thing is I am very comfortable in GCP, so that would kind of suck. bleh.

Mohune 7y ago

What if you use a different google account only for this?