I was a big fan of Firebase¹ and recommended it to some of my friends as a good start-up technology. The main attraction is that it is(was) providing a true freemium model. The free tier doesn't require any credit card. Recently they changed their model and now all the tiers need a credit card to operate.²
The problem in giving credit cards for the free tier
There may be a simple question. Why can't we just give the credit card but use the free tier? There are problems with it.
DDoS
In case there are a lot of requests to the system, it will attract the money. If there is a limit by the provider to stop responding, it is fine. Otherwise, we will end up long time calling customer care.
Those requests may be legit or part of a DDoS³ attack.
Accidental dev/testing cost
I was using ASP.Net for my personal portfolio site in the beginning. When I marketed my site to colleagues, one of my automation test friends simply run a load test against my portfolio site and took it down. It survived because the plan was a monthly fixed cost. At that time the SaaS model pricing was not common.
What is the alternative?
There are still freemium server side execution providers. We can migrate the workloads from Google firebase to them.¹
One of such provider is Heroku⁴. Another provider in my radar is Netlify⁵.
Migration
Depends on the workload the migration efforts will vary. Starting from the language support to the data store capabilities there are changes. There are lot of comparisons available out in the internet⁶ to take decisions. At least for me it was easy I was using NodeJS and no data storage.
If you are looking for a list I am maintaining one.
Reference
- ¹ https://firebase.google.com/pricing
- ² https://stackoverflow.com/a/62824105/181832
- ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
- ⁴ https://www.heroku.com/
- ⁵ https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
- ⁶ Comparisons
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