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I am ecstatic that someone is finally taking on Firebase. As a Firebase user, I find it invaluable. Their free plan and limits are very generous. The fact they offer not only a database, but authentication, hosting and perhaps one of their biggest features besides authentication: Firebase Functions. I have API's in deployment that are solely running using Firebase Functions and using Firestore as the database. The CLI is also another huge Firebase feature.

Following this intently, because Firebase has no true competitor, let alone an open source one. Nice work so far.

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I've been using Firebase since 2016 in production and after all these years I find the service quite lacking.

Both databases are super limited and put all the burden of work to the client(s) for anything beyond very simple queries.

The functions have some of the worst cold starts I've experienced. Until very recently the dev experience was terrible but Firebase local dev was released a couple of days ago so this should be solved.

As for alternatives, AFAIK there is nothing that replicates the whole platform but there are better options for the individual parts.

- FaunaDB instead of Firestore.

- Vercel for edge static hosting + cloud functions.

- Netlify for everything except the databases

Etc.

FWIW, the cold start issue (which was hitting me with regular 10-30+ second delays for even the simplest of functions) has recently been "fixed" (at least, I'm down to <1-2 second cold starts).

The specific issue I was running into: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-node/issues/2942

Check this benchmark:

https://serverless-benchmark.com/

It displays data from the last 3 days of tests. Google Cloud has a max peak of 60 seconds for cold starts. It's the second worst after Azure.

Wow that is pretty bleak actually. 500ms+ in a world where edge cached serves at 5ms def means one needs to deploy these strategically only

Thats an amazing benchmark. Though you have to fiddle with the concurrency parameter to see that some of the slowness is caused by scaling.

OTOH cold starts are calculated with a concurrency of only 10.

The point of using serverless is handling massive traffic spikes efficiently and cheaply but 10 concurrent connections doesn't seem very massive.

Cloudflare Workers are doing much better than the rest in this respect (see the max value, the graph is misleading) but these have serious limitations (eg: max 50ms of CPU time). This makes them a bad fit for most situations.

In my current project which requires lowest possible latency I'm having more success with Fly.io. Instead of having cloud functions you create docker images which are distributed on their regions and scale up/down based on demand on that region.

https://fly.io/

That's like cloud run which I also prefer. I'll try fly it looks like an even better fit

I'm still getting regular 15-20 second cold starts.

Have you checked Amplify? Haven't had the chance to really do anything with it yet, but I've heard quite a lot of good from a few people.

Firebase smell the Google Maps model with its “free” for a long time plan, before turning up the price when most of the market is used to the product and are to deeply locked to the API.

Why shouldn't they charge for a great product ? When Google charges it's a problem when they don't charge it's a problem.

> Why shouldn't they charge for a great product ?

They should charge from the beginning.

> When Google charges it's a problem

Where is that ? It's a problem when it's abrupt.

It's easy taking the high road when you're not the one actually doing something.

As a business, if you're getting something for free, assume someone else is subsidising you, as there's no such thing as free lunch.

Not sure what is the point you are trying to make. What high road did I take ?

> if you're getting something for free, assume someone else is subsidising you, as there's no such thing as free lunch

And how does this matter to the commend that OP made which I was replying to ?

No, when they tout the product as free or cheap, and then only later up the pricing by 10x, once people have built their business around the older pricing model. That's a problem.

If you don't want to pay then roll your own solution or use this startup

God forbid someone wants to get money for their product

No one's saying they shouldn't. If the current business model isn't sustainable, then it's a predatory lock-in scheme to monopolize the market and then take advantage of the people who've become dependant on your product.

Couldn't agree more. If major price changes are required to make the product work well after customers have been "enticed" in with a reasonable cost, it is underhanded to say the least.

It's more than just "entice". Google has crippled apps which don't use FCM since Oreo by limiting their ability to run alternatives which have a blocking socket waiting for new information. Only choice is to use FCM or lose essential functionality.

FCM is part of the core API now. They don't want other shitty solutions constantly waking the device up and eating your battery. That is why only FCM i.e. a trusted source is white listed. It's easy to peddle half truths hear just give it an anti Google color and carry your pitch forks.

Former Firebase and Parse employee. Back when Parse was coincidentally working on GCM (aka FCM) support to improve reliability over our own blocking-socket push network Google threatened to shut down our customers if they used our network. I personally liked our approach which used our network in China and Google elsewhere. I would believe Google were just concerned with Android quality, except our customers reported that they were being scraped from meetup lists, interviewed, and told that Facebook was pricing Parse low to steal data from our users.

We went quickly from "Why shouldn't they charge for a great product?" to "they deliberately toasted competing solutions by creating a white-list with only their own."

Admittedly, some other solutions were shitty and ate into the battery, but this wasn't the case for everything and forcing everyone onto a proprietary platform if they need an always connected background service is not "a great product," but a defective one.

This is literally what Apple does and HN goes gaga over it. Literally only first party core services are allowed and given special privileges.

Yeah, I wouldn't touch an Apple product either.

I get your point that people expect differently from Google, but Google brought that upon themselves by marketing Android as an open source alternative to iOS. Now they've got the market share and developers, they're no longer interested in marketing it this way and are now apparently more interested in cementing the walled garden.

The battery issue is a valid concern, but I don't buy that this policy is purely to fix that problem. They took the opportunity to make sure people are passing all of their data through Google services in order to have full functionality on their devices.

I'd rather have good battery than random HN flame bait. 99% of users will too.

And Android is open source. I'm sure you can Google the URL. The same can't be said about Apple. Do you see the iOS source anywhere ?

Apple is routinely bashed around here, and rightly so.

I remember some software VC lady explaining this tactic among others for OSS businesses on the software engineering daily podcast. Her world seemed so inherently competitive, yet here she was, revealing her cards. Even though burning bridges to get ahead is typical behavior, it remains destructive. Calling it out helps us all move in a better direction.

If you've built your business so it is dependent on someone else's pricing model the problem is of your own making.

Then I think you would agree:Don’t trust Google to keep the prices low. Or any cloud SaaS company that has raised prices

> Don't trust Google. Or any company.

FTFY :)

I trust Google the same way I trust any company I deal with whether they are a SaaS company or my local butcher. I trust them to act in their own self-interest. Hopefully that will be inline with my own but if not be prepared.

Think you’ll have a hard time building a business without being dependent on a suppliers Pricing model

The problem is making yourself completely dependent on a single supplier.

The pseudo-democratic silicon valley model of freemium is the problem. Seducing you into using something with the word 'free' but then trapping you with a changing API and cost structure. They should be up front with the realization that our ability to pay THEM is not commensurate with use by OUR users. Fees should based on OUR revenue, not usage.

That's why I always look for an open-source alternative before using a free tier app. The free tiers are subsidized by paid ones so eventually users will have to pay up. Will be adding Supbase to https://opensource.builders.

This is not a charity

> Fees should based on OUR revenue, not usage.

So if someone builds a business that makes very little money but uses a ton of compute, the cloud provider should subsidize that? And conversely if you make a ton of money using barely any compute, you should pay your cloud provider a premium? This business model makes no sense.

Seen a lot of non sense but the op's model is right up there.

The cloud provider would very much like to have the premium part of the model without the subsidy. Theres a reason a lot of b2b enterprise products dont list prices on their websites and ask that you contact sales instead. Value based pricing and all.

If you want to use a lot of resources without paying the cost of providing them, you are the definition of a bad customer. Your service provider isn’t your VC, not lest of all because you aren’t giving them equity. Bad customers should always be fired ASAP so they don’t damage the business.

Ideally a business provides a service it’s customers are happy to pay the costs of, and not just the costs, but also a significant profit. That leads to a virtuous circle where the business is incentivized to continue to invest in the service, adding more servers, engineers and support personnel to add more valuable features for its customers.

Otherwise it’s just a matter of time before they post that farewell letter and give you the phase out date the servers are shutting down.

The problem is they've forced people to use the product by hindering their ability to run background services without it. Since Oreo, background services are turned to idle unless they receive high priority push notifications from FCM.

And this is done to tackle the horrendous battery issues.

> when they don't charge it's a problem

only if it means they'll kill the service, or "you're the product"-ize its users

Just this year, Google/firebase has dropped their flat monthly fee plan which increased the spark plans limits. Just this week cloud functions have been removed from the free spark plan, which will break a lot of peoples apps.

These decisions are alienating to me. I've been working on migrating my heroku mern stack app to firebase but now I'm having serious second thoughts. I was initially attracted by the free and flat fee plans. I won't ever sign up for a service that demands absolute liability without any way to put hard limits on expense. Without a way to put an absolute maximum limit on expenses, whether $10k or 0.01, I'll never upgrade my account on firebase.

I've spent this week reviewing some alternatives and standing up everything myself on a vps is more attractive then losing sleep over the possibility of my crappy code bankrupting me on firebase.

Wow, did not know they dropped cloud functions from the free tier, but don't you get a free usage tier as long as you provide a credit card?

firebaser here

Both are indeed correct: you must now provide a credit card to use Cloud Functions, and you do get a free tier on the Blaze plan.

In fact, the Blaze plan comes with a free tier that is bigger than the limit of the free plan was, but you can no longer use it without entering a credit card.

This change came while adding support for newer node.js versions. Cloud Functions now uses Cloud Build to create its containers, and while Cloud Build does offer a free tier, you'll have to enter a credit card to use it.

I've read too many stories of people and companies being temporarily (and possibly permanently) incorrectly flagged/banned from Google (by some algorithm).

If your business depends on Google, you are taking serious risk. Even if you have a contact within Google who can champion your case, a loss of your Google services could end your business.

I wouldn't worry about this. Any examples?

Why, so you can quarrel with each one and dissemble at every turn? Everyone knows what GP is talking about. If you don’t think it’s a risk, then enjoy!

I got my old google account banned when I enabled adsense (and did absolutely nothing with it). They blocked me from random number of their services so that account became unusable. And I dis nothing wrong. And no way for appeal.

idk what I was thinking with my comment above! I think it was misplaced.

It's really sad that Google and other big corps do this to people. They destroy their livelihoods on a whim. We really have to think of a way to divest ourselves from them (GCloud, AWS, I;m looking at you too)

I am not sure if I can get behind this. Company invests work and money into a product, makes it free for the community and smaller businesses to use only to have people turn around and copy it and break the "you use my product for free and give me some publicity" contract. Something is ticking me off morally on this.

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