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

Firebase billing behavior and “surprise bills”

• Firebase budgets are alerts only; they do not stop usage. Several commenters only realized this from the docs after seeing this incident.
• The official “avoid surprise bills” guidance focuses on alerts and monitoring, not hard enforcement, which many feel does little to actually prevent surprises.
• Free tiers can be hard‑limited or throttled, but once on paid plans, enforcement becomes softer and more opaque.

Hard billing caps: desirability vs difficulty

• Many want an opt‑in hard cap: on hitting a limit, services would be throttled or shut off until manual re‑enablement.
• Supporters argue even an approximate cutoff (with some overrun) is far better than a 3–4‑order‑of‑magnitude surprise.
• Others argue robust caps are technically very hard across many services:
  • Some usage (e.g., network egress) is known only with delay.
  • Enforcing per‑request checks would add latency or require complex distributed coordination.
  • “At rest” resources (storage, backups) raise questions about what to stop or delete.
• Quotas, max autoscaling, and per‑resource limits are proposed as partial mitigations.

Security, misuse, and Firebase complexity

• Firebase is easy to start but “hard to master.” Misunderstood Firestore rules and billing per document processed can cause huge costs.
• It’s easy to accidentally expose data or allow malicious writes, which can generate runaway usage.
• The thread attributes this incident to storing around a petabyte in GCS in a day, possibly via a poorly controlled implementation.

Risk management: LLCs, insurance, cards

• Some advocate using LLCs per app or for hosting contracts to contain liability; others note courts can pierce the veil for fraud, negligence, or “sham” entities.
• Ideas for insurance against cloud overages are floated but widely doubted as practical or fairly priced.
• Virtual cards with low limits help contain card charges but do not erase legal liability for the debt.

Alternatives and broader incentives

• Several prefer fixed‑price VPS or simpler clouds (traditional droplets, Lightsail‑like products, Fly.io with prepaid credits, Supabase, etc.) for predictable bills.
• Some see providers’ refusal to offer caps as primarily profit‑driven; others emphasize enterprise customers’ preference for never‑down services and argue refunds for edge cases are the de facto safety valve.