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I love the idea of Firebase but the thing keeping me off it is the pricing. It's like regular cloud pricing on steroids. Comparing Firebase pricing to say a $5

I love the idea of Firebase but the thing keeping me off it is the pricing. It's like regular cloud pricing on steroids. Comparing Firebase pricing to say a $5 droplet from DigitalOcean: - Bandwidth egress uses Google's standard pricing, which is hilariously uncompetitive (~0.12$/GB vs. ~0.01$/GB) and totally inappropriate for anything bandwidth-intensive like image hosting. - $5/month will get you 2.7M writes, 8.3M reads or 25M deletes on Firebase while Postgres running on a DigitalOcean droplet should be able to handle at least ~500 transactions a second, or ~1.3B per month. - A GB-month of RAM costs $6.48 on Firebase and is included as part of the $5 droplet from DO. - A month of CPU time costs $25.92 on Firebase and is included as part of the $5 droplet from DO. So a $5 DO droplet will give you 1GB-month, 1 CPU-month, 1.3B write transactions and 1TB of bandwidth. For those same resources you'd pay $6.48 for RAM, $25.92 for CPU time, $2332 for 1.3B writes, and $120 for bandwidth, for a total of $2484.40, or 497x more. Even if you just look at the CPU and RAM, it's 6x more expensive. I can imagine this being great for a pet project where you might only use a few minutes of CPU time each month but for any kind of scale, the resource costs just seem crazy.

mrtksn 7y ago
Oh definitely, I am hoping to see serious competitors so that the prices go down. I also wish for an open-source alternative where we can spin it on our own server. That said, even at these prices, it is quite useful. I think If you need that many writes for cheap, it's probably part of your core product and you can concentrate on building a custom solution for that and take advantage of the rest of the product for the more mundane tasks of your business, like user access management for example. Besides, If you think about it, 1.3 billion writes are about two writes per every person in USA and EU combined. There are usually a lot of things that you can do to optimize and reduce writes and make each write worthwhile.
vinay_ys 7y ago
Are you equating one droplet with no redundancy or scalability to Firebase's services? Also, will postgres sustain 500 transactions/sec for a month to reach 1.3B. Sounds like serious stretch to me.

mrtksn 7y ago

Oh definitely, I am hoping to see serious competitors so that the prices go down. I also wish for an open-source alternative where we can spin it on our own server. That said, even at these prices, it is quite useful. I think If you need that many writes for cheap, it's probably part of your core product and you can concentrate on building a custom solution for that and take advantage of the rest of the product for the more mundane tasks of your business, like user access management for example. Besides, If you think about it, 1.3 billion writes are about two writes per every person in USA and EU combined. There are usually a lot of things that you can do to optimize and reduce writes and make each write worthwhile.

vinay_ys 7y ago

Are you equating one droplet with no redundancy or scalability to Firebase's services? Also, will postgres sustain 500 transactions/sec for a month to reach 1.3B. Sounds like serious stretch to me.