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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

There's no way in hell anyone should ever under any circumstance use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really.

Just suspend service on excessive overages...

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Yeah. Elsewhere in these comments there's a link to a support thread[0] where Netlify support essentially says you shouldn't ever need an option to suspend your site at a certain point because:

#1. If you think there's any chance of getting DDoSd, you should already be on a business plan instead of a starter tier.

#2. If you think there's any chance of your site going viral, you're going to want to pay the cost anyway to let all those people visit.

I agree that's ridiculous and that the lack of any option of capping costs would mean I'd never sign up for the service. But that's the official response, for what its worth.

[0] https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...

So anyone whos site might be posted to HN should be on a business plan.

I'd think Hacker News actually comes under #2. If 100,000 people come from Hacker News to look at your hobby site about the Aamber Pegasus, you're supposed to think of how you've improved their lives by letting them read about it.

Like in the past, when you went over your limit your page went offline. The good old Slashdot effect

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

too lazy is a bit uncharitable. These terms tend to be buried 8pt font disclaimer text and esoteric metering matrixes.

meanwhile in size 72 font on the marketing page it says FREE STATIC SITE HOSTING!

that's why this thread is more or less condemning scammy business practices.

[edit] check out this forum explanation from render.com billing:

> Free Tier Services are suspended, no overage charges. Paid Tier Services are unaffected (Free Tier Services can be upgraded to a Paid Tier, this isn’t an overage because you are manually intervening.) Exceeding allotted Bandwidth does result in automatic overage charges. $30 for additional 100 GB blocks. Exceeding Pipeline Minutes results in deployments failing and no overage charges by default, you can configure whether you want to allow overage charges for additional blocks of Pipeline Minutes.

I still don't understand, free tiers are suspended so no overage charges, but then how can they exceed bandwidth of which we're liable? x_X

Possibly making explicit that while it might go over before their suspension logic kicks in, you won't be charged for it on a free tier.

People don't check for every possible thing that can go wrong, otherwise we wouldn't have time to do anything. I remember when I got charged a "cancelling fee" for cancelling my Adobe subscription that accidentally went past its free trial. The situation was so ludicrous that I had never imagined that they would charge something like 6 months worth of subs me to cancel a monthly subscription. In the end I got out of it and paid nothing but I have absolutely hated Adobe ever since.

These things are scams because they prey on the fact that they're the only one shitty enough to do something so shitty and are counting on you not realising just how shitty they are.

Sorry, maybe this is a generational thing? I always look for a catch when something is "free". Your example as old as time, offer a free trial period but if you don't cancel X days before it ends, you automatically subscribe for another week/month/year. This has extended to getting a big discount for your first year after signup and then you pretty much have to cancel and go to a competitor, or wait until a couple days before the contract ends and some sales rep will call you and offer you another discount. It's scummy, it sucks, but it's been s reality for decades and is only getting worse.

With hosting - be it cloud or virtual or real hardware - the problem has always been that bandwidth use is completely outside your control. It was the first thing to check in the early 2000s and still is today, to an even greater extend.

So yes, sorry, as the other reply says, I might come across uncharitable or even condescending, but as tech people developing tech stuff how can one not be at least a little careful when there's a big "free candy" sign slapped onto something?

I definitely think this is a generational thing. Like you, I come from the land of "everything costs something" and treat free with suspicion, but also, we have been conditioning people to expect things to be free, and to bury and distract people from the real cost of those things for quite some time.

Two of the largest video content distribution platforms on the Internet, YouTube and Twitch. Free!* (just watch these ads). Store your data on the cloud with Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive! Free!* (just let us harvest data about what you put in there) Hell, 25 years ago, you want to get on the internet? Use NetZero! Free!* (just look at these popups) And this pattern continues to be pervasive. And the real killer here is that we keep getting things for free*, so people that weren't around during the introduction of these tactics have grown accustom to it as if it's how things should be.

So, I agree, we really have a problem here in messaging and in using misleading psychology to bury dark patterns like the true cost of Free in services we use. We probably should be teaching more folks to beware of the true cost of things, that if it's free, you're the product, not the user, so on and so forth.

You do not understand. Of course I know that if I fail to cancel, then I must keep paying. I had a month's subscription. At worst I expected to pay for one extra month of subscription before I remembered to cancel. I was OK with that perceived risk and understood it.

What I did not expect: to cancel one month of subscription you must pay 6 months of subscription as a cancellation fee. Maybe you expect that, but I have seen that anywhere else and did not expect it.

>So yes, sorry, as the other reply says, I might come across uncharitable or even condescending, but as tech people developing tech stuff how can one not be at least a little careful when there's a big "free candy" sign slapped onto something?

It wasn't free candy in my case, I was paying.

But then where would you run a small hobby project that you'd like to run in the cloud? I have some small stuff I'm running on Google Cloud Platform, and honestly I'm scared of the same thing happening to me because there's no easy way to set a limit. But AWS and Azure have the same policy.

(In my case, I'm looking for somewhere I can easily deploy a set of ~5 Docker containers, they don't need to scale up, and it's a hobby project so I'd like to keep costs as low as possible.)

The big, professional, business cloud providers aren't designed for small hobby projects with expenditure limits.

You should look into going old school and just renting a VPS with any VPS provider that's not AWS/GCP/Azure. I know the big three are super popular, as are all of these "serverless" cloud companies, but very few of them offer the most important service for a small project: shutting down before you owe them a fortune.

Depending on the guarantees you want, Oracle has a free tier with no time limit. It provides 4 ARM cores with something crazy like up to 6GB of RAM for free. You may have a few days if downtime during maintenance, but once you've allocated the resources, you'll eventually get your services back from what I can tell. Best part is, if you only use their free tier, you need to manually upgrade your account to even be able to buy anything extra. Just make sure you have backups in case Oracle pulls an Oracle.

Or you could get a VPS from a budget hoster like Contabo, which isn't free but will fit most hobby projects I know just fine. They may shut you down if they're suffering from a DDoS because of you, but you won't get a $100k bill.

self-Host with a provider that has clear TOS and not twenty pages of fine print. Something like the good old "if you exceed X TB in a month, you will be limited to 10mbit/s for the rest of that month". As long as you're running a hobby project or even some side project that starts making money but is still beta, this should be good enough. Once business gets serious, you will inevitably have to spend more money, and you might have to look at cloudflare et al if you're actually in a business where ddos happen.

Seriously, if you just want to run docker, maintaining a debian VPS for that is basically enabling unattended-upgrades and doing a dist-upgrade every two years. If you can't be arsed to do that then maybe you deserve the 100k bill...

I run my hobby projects on GCP. There's a daily spend limit you can set.

Just get a standard normal VPS from Hetzner or something, you don't need crap like GCS.

Hetzner is a really great value option if they cover your region (primarily Europe).

first of all these cloud services are designed especially for that, for autoscaling. Second of all, if these are hobby projects we cannot look every hour the costs etc unlike people who's that their job. So stop calling people lazy and pretend like you are better than others because you are not.

I understand that some businesses might want to take the hit from a cost surge because they get an even higher revenue surge. But a large fraction of sites aren't like that and would prefer a loss of service to a cost overrun. Service providers should always offer a "maximum out-of-pocket cost" service option. Those that don't aren't suitable vendors for most customers and customers should be warned about them.

I believe that's what Firebase Hosting does.

As I recall, you have to actively sign up for the paid plan (Blaze) to get pay-as-you-go billing. Otherwise, you get free quota, and if it's up, it's up.

I think it also integrates into all of Google Cloud's billing management stuff, but I've never had to bother with that.

> use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really.

Like all of the big clouds with free tiers and nuke it from orbit level footguns lying about everywhere?

Use a virtual card with just a small amount of money on it to limit your liability. Won't work if you've entered a contract, but for a lot of these providers, including AWS it works.

This "one crazy trick" does nothing to limit your true liability.

If you go to a restaurant someone at your table orders 5,000 plates of mozzarella sticks, the fact that your credit card only covers $5 doesn't mean you are magically absolved from the rest of the bill.

For $100k, a debt collection firm would be more than happy to get a judgement against you. Credit card or no.

Totally agree, it's an unacceptable risk

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