5 ms·

I don’t want an unlimited bandwidth promise, I want a cap that I know can never be exceeded. I mean, I use Azure professionally and one of the key reasons I don

I don’t want an unlimited bandwidth promise, I want a cap that I know can never be exceeded. I mean, I use Azure professionally and one of the key reasons I don’t use it to host my own stuff is exactly because it could potentially become very expensive. I’d rather have my own stuff shut down until I decide what I want to do with it. Things like alerts are fine, professionally, but not for things like running a small app, blog or whatever, that you’re not sure where is heading. I don’t think anything I’ve build on my own time has ever ended up breaking my bank, but signing up my credit card is a risk I’m never going to take, and I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in that. Of course I have no idea if there are enough of us to make small scale fixed prices products profitable at scale.

mrkurt 4y ago
We actually launched with that feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 No one took us up on it. What we found is that the majority of people want their stuff to stay up, and the right UX for "shut it down so you don't get billed" is not obvious. We ended up implementing prepayment instead. If you sign up and buy $25 in credit, we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out. Bandwidth is weird because we have to pay for it (as does every other provider). We aren't yet in a position where we can just make it free without limits. Maybe next year. :)
- brundolf 4y ago
  I can't speak for your whole market, but I know for me the pre-loading flow sounds really clunky because I'd have to go and manually add funds each month (right?) It's understandable if your usage data showed the fee-capping feature just wasn't popular enough to be worth maintaining, though that would surprise me based on this thread (but possibly HN just isn't representative of the whole market)
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    I’d be happy with a “refill if under $10 up to $x/month”. If they can cut off when you’re out of credit they can presumably do it for other criteria, too.
- the_duke 4y ago
  I'm actually very curious: why is bandwidth so much cheaper on more traditional VPS or dedicated server hosts like Hetzner ? This extends to their somewhat new-ish cloud product, where you get 20TB traffic included - even on a tiny instance. And it's 1 Euro per TB after that. [1] Do they just decide to not profit from bandwidth or are they doing something special that allows them to be so cheap? [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
  - mrkurt 4y ago
    There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices: 1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example) 2. Constrain throughput per server 3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours. Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops. We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user. We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)
    - boundlessdreamz 4y ago
      The chennai pricing in incredibly steep. It's weird that bandwidth prices for end-users in India is among the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in the world but enterprise customers are paying so much.
      - donavanm 4y ago
        Jio and friends are (were?) subsidizing connectivity and trying to drive growth to make it up later/elsewhere like payments and services. Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets. Very similar dynamics with china as well.
- raytracer 4y ago
  Having a billing limit is important to me as I don't want to risk unbounded costs for personal projects. > we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out. This sounds great! I've looked at Fly.io before but didn't realise this was a thing so didn't go past looking. I'll definitely give Fly.io a test run now. :)
- Kinrany 4y ago
  Do you also have a monthly prepayment subscription where the balance is topped up to a fixed (ideally, optionally calculated automatically via web UI by the user)? Naively that's what I'd expect the solution to look like.
manigandham 4y ago
This topic has been discussed many times. There's no easy solution to what happens after the cap is exceeded - should the vendor delete everything? - which is why so many of them don't bother. And for customers, it's far easier to negotiate billing disputes then to try and recover from an account deletion because of spending caps (and there have been plenty of examples of companies shutting down because of such a mistake here).
- xchaotic 4y ago
  Imo it’s really simple, actually. Stop the service and delete after the next billing cycle. Price that in for regular price of the service.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    That's limited to free tiers that usually deactivate or delete if there's too much usage. Anything with production usage and pay-as-you-go pricing means data at rest still costs money - and requires deleting to avoid accruing new charges. Do you want your databases and volumes and object storage deleted when your app stops? And if this was offered then there would be a whole new class of mistakes leading to lost data. Like I said, billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts.
    - brundolf 4y ago
      > billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts Maybe, but I'd still like the option. My blog site is stateless so I couldn't care less if the service got deleted
    - newaccount74 4y ago
      The high charges are almost never storage costs, its almost always processing or bandwidth. And storage costs are simple to predict -- as soon as you see the cap would be exceeded, stop accepting new data.
      - 4y ago
oxff 4y ago
Yeah, if I'm going to be signing up with my credit card I'll just log back into my AWS account since I have already pricing monitoring setup for that stuff. I definitely don't want to worry about it (surprise costs) for scratch / hobby stuff, let alone monitor bills for it. With Heroku it is stupidly simple to get things going, no credit cards, "fire and forget". Works great for hobby projects, and examples you want to show.
FBISurveillance 4y ago
This. I've had a very real situation with DataDog: I've accidentally created a Synthetics test (and forgot about it) on a test account and incurred $5k+ bill at end of month. Zero notice or anything. I ended up swallowing the bill but will not be using them again since this is plain scary. Edit: funny thing - to add insult to injury, I've started to hear from their sales people on "my growth plans", even though I've had a support ticket hoping to resolve this to no avail.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Datadog is one of the worst offenders in this one. It's like they actually want to get you into that situation. Wanna see your prepaid capacity? Lol, email our support. Wanna use front-end monitoring? Here's an example with the defaults hidden. (Oh btw the defaults enable all the features and set the sampling to 100%) How do I turn on sampling? Don't worry, limitless tracing is the way, we'll figure out how to filter your traces. (Oh btw you'll still pay for ingestion, we're just omitting it here)

mrkurt 4y ago

We actually launched with that feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 No one took us up on it. What we found is that the majority of people want their stuff to stay up, and the right UX for "shut it down so you don't get billed" is not obvious. We ended up implementing prepayment instead. If you sign up and buy $25 in credit, we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out. Bandwidth is weird because we have to pay for it (as does every other provider). We aren't yet in a position where we can just make it free without limits. Maybe next year. :)

brundolf 4y ago
I can't speak for your whole market, but I know for me the pre-loading flow sounds really clunky because I'd have to go and manually add funds each month (right?) It's understandable if your usage data showed the fee-capping feature just wasn't popular enough to be worth maintaining, though that would surprise me based on this thread (but possibly HN just isn't representative of the whole market)
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I’d be happy with a “refill if under $10 up to $x/month”. If they can cut off when you’re out of credit they can presumably do it for other criteria, too.
the_duke 4y ago
I'm actually very curious: why is bandwidth so much cheaper on more traditional VPS or dedicated server hosts like Hetzner ? This extends to their somewhat new-ish cloud product, where you get 20TB traffic included - even on a tiny instance. And it's 1 Euro per TB after that. [1] Do they just decide to not profit from bandwidth or are they doing something special that allows them to be so cheap? [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
- mrkurt 4y ago
  There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices: 1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example) 2. Constrain throughput per server 3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours. Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops. We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user. We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)
  - boundlessdreamz 4y ago
    The chennai pricing in incredibly steep. It's weird that bandwidth prices for end-users in India is among the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in the world but enterprise customers are paying so much.
    - donavanm 4y ago
      Jio and friends are (were?) subsidizing connectivity and trying to drive growth to make it up later/elsewhere like payments and services. Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets. Very similar dynamics with china as well.
raytracer 4y ago
Having a billing limit is important to me as I don't want to risk unbounded costs for personal projects. > we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out. This sounds great! I've looked at Fly.io before but didn't realise this was a thing so didn't go past looking. I'll definitely give Fly.io a test run now. :)
Kinrany 4y ago
Do you also have a monthly prepayment subscription where the balance is topped up to a fixed (ideally, optionally calculated automatically via web UI by the user)? Naively that's what I'd expect the solution to look like.

manigandham 4y ago

This topic has been discussed many times. There's no easy solution to what happens after the cap is exceeded - should the vendor delete everything? - which is why so many of them don't bother. And for customers, it's far easier to negotiate billing disputes then to try and recover from an account deletion because of spending caps (and there have been plenty of examples of companies shutting down because of such a mistake here).

xchaotic 4y ago
Imo it’s really simple, actually. Stop the service and delete after the next billing cycle. Price that in for regular price of the service.
- manigandham 4y ago
  That's limited to free tiers that usually deactivate or delete if there's too much usage. Anything with production usage and pay-as-you-go pricing means data at rest still costs money - and requires deleting to avoid accruing new charges. Do you want your databases and volumes and object storage deleted when your app stops? And if this was offered then there would be a whole new class of mistakes leading to lost data. Like I said, billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    > billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts Maybe, but I'd still like the option. My blog site is stateless so I couldn't care less if the service got deleted
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    The high charges are almost never storage costs, its almost always processing or bandwidth. And storage costs are simple to predict -- as soon as you see the cap would be exceeded, stop accepting new data.
    - 4y ago

oxff 4y ago

Yeah, if I'm going to be signing up with my credit card I'll just log back into my AWS account since I have already pricing monitoring setup for that stuff. I definitely don't want to worry about it (surprise costs) for scratch / hobby stuff, let alone monitor bills for it. With Heroku it is stupidly simple to get things going, no credit cards, "fire and forget". Works great for hobby projects, and examples you want to show.

FBISurveillance 4y ago

This. I've had a very real situation with DataDog: I've accidentally created a Synthetics test (and forgot about it) on a test account and incurred $5k+ bill at end of month. Zero notice or anything. I ended up swallowing the bill but will not be using them again since this is plain scary. Edit: funny thing - to add insult to injury, I've started to hear from their sales people on "my growth plans", even though I've had a support ticket hoping to resolve this to no avail.

viraptor 4y ago
Datadog is one of the worst offenders in this one. It's like they actually want to get you into that situation. Wanna see your prepaid capacity? Lol, email our support. Wanna use front-end monitoring? Here's an example with the defaults hidden. (Oh btw the defaults enable all the features and set the sampling to 100%) How do I turn on sampling? Don't worry, limitless tracing is the way, we'll figure out how to filter your traces. (Oh btw you'll still pay for ingestion, we're just omitting it here)