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Comment by aamederen | Hacker News Reader

Here's a story about why you are right to be anxious: https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-l...

These stories are everywhere. A couple months ago, it hit an associate of mine pretty hard, he moved a small python monitoring and statistics application off a laptop in the office to AWS. A couple weeks later he came back and discovered that it had burned up a few thousand $'s in storage and transfer fees for what normally was a couple hundred MBs of data a day being passed around and a some database updates.

Since it wasn't really worth debugging what went "wrong" it got chalked up as a learning experience and moved back to the laptop where its happily running. If it dies/whatever its no big deal, just a git clone;./runme; and it rebuilds the whole database and creates another web facing interface.

The IaaS guys are masters of marketing. They have convinced everyone that their offerings are less expensive and more reliable, which repeatedly is proven to be false in all but the most dynamic of situations. In this cases its saving $7.99 a month over a unlimited site shared hosting godaddy/whatever plan. Just in case it might need to scale a lot, in which case your going to be paying hundreds if not thousands in surge pricing.

No thanks...

Not sure what happened to your associate but this sounds way, way out there. I run a fairly resource intensive SaaS on AWS (lots of background jobs generating data) and we barely go over $600 a month.

People should not be scared of by these anecdotes, however true they may be. It’s perfectly possible to run a very cost effective business on AWS.

That's great. But you are always just one unfortunate bug or mis-configuration away from having it happen.

Sure, to most people it will never happen. But the risk is always there. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

It's possible to write bug-free code, but would you bet your financial future on your ability to write bug-free code?

Starting to think the reason we arnt working for google/aws is we make mistakes. Whereas engineers at those companies just dont make mistakes, therefor they assume that billing caps are not necessary. Such is our lot in life.

I think the bigger difference (other than a potential skill difference) is rather that they're more willing to take these risks. The ones that are good at it and succeed will rise to the top!

Bug free is a not realistic but if you are a programmer and definitely if you are a tech founder you definitely should be willing to bet your financial future on writing reasonably low bug code.

If you are a programmer, I kind of find the comment puzzling; maybe I am reading you wrong, but you seem to be saying that you are writing code for some company while being happy to commit it and not care if the company loses money if your code is bad? As you would not bet on your work yourself, but you do not mind your employer paying you for it and as such betting some of it’s financial future on your work? Sorry if I misunderstood your comment.

When you work for somebody else (or with somebody else) then you try to do as good of a job as possible, but the ultimate responsibility still lies elsewhere - might be your boss or could even be the group. There will be other people who interact with your code and might spot errors. There will be people who are trained, in some capacity, to figure out ways to mitigate against accidentally generating very large bills. It is exceedingly unlikely that these points hold true for a solo developer working on a main project, let alone a side project.

Even if you are hyper competent and can probably get all of this correctly, you can't rest easy. You simply don't know whether you did everything correctly or not. Just one dumb mistake can saddle you with an enormous bill.

This is just like gun safety: don't point your gun at anything you're not intending to shoot. Mistakes happen and the consequences of it can be catastrophic.

You are right, but at some level you are thinking 'you can do it' right? Otherwise you would be pretty miserable I would imagine. But I agree with the rest you wrote. You meant it slightly more nuanced than I read it!

Virtual cards with limits are an answer to this. Works very well.

Not really. You're still responsible for the bill even if your payment method is capped. They don't just forget about it.

If you never pay then expect some aggressive account shutdown, bans across all connected user accounts, and calls from debt collections.

You are absolutely right; no idea (thinking hard what service I was thinking off now) why I typed that. I was thinking of something entirely else. No-one try this; bad advise; they will indeed come after you. Not

This was discussed on HN (237 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661391

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