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Comment by factsaresacred | Hacker News Reader

I use Firebase and find it easy, useful and constantly improving (cloud functions etc.). Their support, however, is a joke.

5 questions can be logged per year for one-on-one email support and then you're on your own. And this is for urgent requests.

I can understand not wanting to be inundated with wasteful questions but when Firebase is changing their API and pricing plans and you're trying to scale a product, and paying them lots of money in the process, support should be forthcoming.

They also don't respond on their Twitter handle, which is a further crime.

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Dan from Firebase here. I’d like to clarify a few details about the support options that are available. First, the limit of five questions per year applies only to technical troubleshooting questions (i.e. some indeterminate issue in your code that you’d like help with). Developers are always able to contact us an unlimited number of times for issues relating to identified bugs or to request features. Additionally, any questions relating to your account or bills (such as the issue in the original post) are also unlimited.

With that said, it’s been a year since we introduced the five-a-year limit on technical troubleshooting questions. I’ll see if this is actually a useful limit to keep in place and remove it if not.

Thanks for explanation, Dan. My issue is that the switch to the 3.x SDK and moving my assets to Firebase hosting depleted 4 of my 'technical troubleshooting questions' (two of those were bug reports which seem to no longer deduct from the five-a-year limit).

So now I'm looking at a message telling me that 'for all urgent requests...you have 1 question remaining' and hoping that nothing bad happens more than once between now and whenever you decide to allow me, a paying customer, to ask for help again.

To make clear: 99.9% of the time Firebase just works, which is great. And when I did receive support, it was excellent. It's the support model that's weak. Making billing and bug reports unlimited while limiting urgent requests to five a year is poor policy, and not very useful - for your customers at least.

Yes, I understand completely. The intent of the limit is obviously not to discourage legitimate issues from reaching our team. Limits like this are a blunt instrument, and it's possible that the time has come to remove it.

I can't promise a change immediately, but I am taking a very close look at what we can do here.

For technical questions Puf seems to be telepathically connected to StackOverflow. He has answered any of my questions within a an hour or two at the most.

they respond quite fast on the google group. I had never problems with firebase support

https://firebase.community/

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