Firebase bill is usually $50, but I was surprised to see a $70k bill in one day

Maybe this has something to do with it?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;tamarajtran&#x2F;status&#x2F;1867342095033258466" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;tamarajtran&#x2F;status&#x2F;1867342095033258466</a><p>There&#x27;s a really good reason that I don&#x27;t link to my apps on this site (or most, for that matter). They are free apps, running on a shoestring budget.<p>But that whole account looks a little dodgy. The posts make it seem like one of those <i>&quot;I made $30K&#x2F;mo, from my living room! You can too!&quot;</i> outfits.

Run your cloud contracts (or anything possible to incur liability) through a separate LLC so if there are billing issues you can just move on.<p>The structure should look like:<p>&quot;My App LLC&quot; has contract with &quot;My Host LLC&quot; for hosting services. &quot;My Host LLC&quot; provides those services via a cloud provider. If &quot;My Host LLC&quot; racks up a 2 million dollar bill with the cloud provider and goes out of business then I just move to &quot;New Host LLC&quot; and carry on.<p>It&#x27;s not as if the patients of a Doctor who fails to pay his office rent would become liable.<p>This is the entire purpose of LLCs.

In the days before, there used to be a hard spending limit - I know this because of an old official tutorial video on youtube. Last time I checked, there was billing alert functionality and they were recommending creating a function that will halt your service when it hits the limit - the problem is, billing lags behind and you can rack up a hefty sum until anything is triggered.<p>Amazing service but its a scary one. Every time a social-media-worthy accident happens, they cancel the bill but I wonder how many are burned without recourse.<p>Maybe if your rack up something modest like 5K accidentally, its better to push it as high as you can and get it declined on your CC and increase your social media prospects :)

The idea that an app will experience stratospheric growth so suddenly that costs must be allowed to grow 1,000x hour-over-hour has always been insane to me.<p>Why does Firebase insist on hanging the sword of Damocles over all of its customers? I’ve read so many stories before and experienced these fears the first time I was setting up Firebase…this has been going on for years

Firebase is pretty simple to use, and possibly because of this, I&#x27;ve seen quite a few terrible implementations. I think it attracts people who only know app development, where security, scalability, authentication, etc, are not really a concern because you have exactly one user on one device.<p>It&#x27;s easy to accidentally make a bunch of information world-readable, and if a malicious user gets hold of the right details they can simply read all your content out, or even start writing bad content in, racking up a bill in the process.<p>Whether this is what happened here or not I have no idea. And I don&#x27;t think this is even really a problem with Firebase, just an indicator of the sort of developer who ends up using Firebase and their background.

That’s the third big GCP bill story I’ve seen in like 48 hours.<p>Over on Reddit someone got stuck with a 450k one.<p>Struggling to find the third thread again though. Maybe they deleted it<p>Also seeing an uptick in people suggesting insurance as the solution. Which seems insane to me but what do I know

Does Firebase allow you to set up a billing limit, or is it one of those exciting cloud services where no matter what you do you&#x27;re always one mistake away from losing your house?

We are going to continuously see cases like these until the vendors implement functionality like:<p><pre><code> Hard Spending Limit If you configure hard spending limits, then upon the sum of money being reached, the service will be stopped until manual user action is taken. This can result in service outages. Spending limit: ______ $ I have read and agree with the terms: [X] [Confirm] </code></pre> Which is likely to happen never. That&#x27;s why I mostly use traditional VPSes.

That’s exactly the kind of nightmare scenario that inspired us to create Prelude (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prelude.so&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prelude.so&#x2F;</a>). Authentication flows are targeted by fraud like SMS pumping that leaves companies with super high bills that make no business sense.<p>Our API helps apps take control of their SMS verification costs by proactively blocking fraudulent and suspicious verification attempts before they ever trigger an SMS. On top of that, we let users set daily limits as an additional safety net, so surprises like this don’t happen.

&gt; Upwork engineer<p>Arguably worse than an average 2025 LLM.

Damn, Just learned that firebase budget is not a hard limit. This is bad. Is there a way to setup a hard budget limit? if not, i think I will need to replace firebase for my web app.

This happened to me previously where enabling a firestore backup service almost doubled my bill. In my case the google support people were very gracious to wave that off, it took some time but it happened.<p>Had a good experience with them.<p>Though I wish taking backups on firestore was easier.

Ugh<p>I still have a couple of apps running on Firebase. I can&#x27;t wait to get rid of those.<p>In 2016 Firebase seemed the holy grail for frontend devs and I deeply regret ever using it.

hopefully dev has insurance?<p>but anyway, this is partially why I spin up an LLC for every app i make... just declare bankruptcy and kill it

Probably a silly question, but what are the apps she built? Just curious what they are. Thanks.

I notice that the post is now gone. Looks like she locked her feed.<p>Probably because of this discussion.

Go get a $50 unlimited traffic VPS from IONOS.

This is ridiculous (for Firebase). There have been countless episodes like this one happening, as well as the amount of people asking for a hard-block when the spending reaches a certain limit (currently there&#x27;s only a notification that is triggered, which is anyway lagged behind the actual execution). Making a mistake can happen to anyone (especially for a platform that targets itself to new devs) and makes me seriously consider leaving the platform.<p>To Firebase: either you must automatically condone such mistakes or implement the requested feature.<p>To anybody else: Does Supabase or other platforms offer this?

tldr: stored 1pb in a GCS bucket. this persons twitter account is about how they have hacked growth and have had 3 number one apps, crazy growth, etc. well, I hope they can pay.<p>also, billing caps really don’t make any sense. a competitor could easily exploit that to take your service down. best to you know, architect your stuff correctly… speaking of architecture, creating a paas where you have a hard billing cap would pretty much obliterate performance as you would need round trips each time you do anything in order to confirm you’re not over the amount.

I always use a virtual credit card number (like Citi provides) everywhere which has a daily hard limit.