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.
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.
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.
They should charge from the beginning.
> When Google charges it's a problem
Where is that ? It's a problem when it's abrupt.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
FTFY :)
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.
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.
only if it means they'll kill the service, or "you're the product"-ize its users