I'm learning Firebase, can you somehow get over the 50K reading limit? I don't want to release a product with Firebase, but I'm learning it and that's why I got 50K readings by accident. Do you have any way? Creating a new project is not an option because I can only create 2.
The documented limits for the free tier cannot be exceeded. They are hard limits.
You can use the emulator locally on your machine if you want to experiment without cost.
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So I am currently trying to make the code of my app a little more efficient because of increasing user counts the costs of Firebase are rising very rapidly. I figured that in development I made a few poor query decisions, therefore "unintended" usage of data transfer. Whatever now I am trying to develop better solutions to that. But for that really to work I would need some kind of way to actually monitor how much less/more data a query uses. Is there currently a way in flutter?
The Firebase Realtime Database comes with several tools to monitor aggregate data usage and to monitor performance. To see the specific access patterns over a shorter period of time, consider using the database profiler.
I am using firebase realtime database.
The project works like a chat application.
We are constantly downloading / uploading.
But the cost seems too high. All data is downloaded again every get 1 message. What can I do to reduce the cost of this?
Instead of downloading data again every time I think of creating a cache. What should we pay attention to when creating the cache?
What are the solutions Firebase offers to reduce cost for realtime database?
Thanks, best regards
The pricing page of Firebase is pretty clear. The cost for the Realtime Database is based on:
The amount of data you store in the database.
The amount of data that is read from the database.
So those are the two factors you'll need to pay attention to if you want to reduce the cost.
Which one has the highest impact really depends on where your cost is coming from, which you didn't say. But the most common one is to look if you can reduce the number of times each client downloads the same data by local caching. If you're using the native mobile SDKs for iOS and Android (which you also don't mention), you can often already accomplish some reduction by enabling disk caching.
Unfortunately Firebase's Flame plan disappeared and I now have to deal with Blaze plan, which I'm not fan of because of it's "unlimited" budget (but my wallet isn't). Yesterday I was coding and by mistake made a loop that called 3 Cloud Functions, I spotted the loop fast enough to stop the carnage.
In only 15 seconds of execution, I've been able to trigger more than 10K requests, and without errors, that a pretty good performance of Firebase, but it's scary as well! How can I cap this to throttle requests coming from users? I'm pretty confident in my code, but as we all know if someone gets my Firebase config file, I'm done.
I'm a solo developer and it's my first app done on my spare time, I don't want to to become a mess because of triggering reads / writes / Cloud Functions. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, maybe I didn't spot a small bug in my code that'll reveal it's true potential only once in production. I'm not asking Firebase to handle my mistakes, but I'd like to be able to stop the CF and Firebase if I want to.
My only desire is to sleep confident, I don't want to wake up one morning with a 10.000$ bill. I've read that's it's possible to totally disable billing account on a project with CloudFunctions, but what will happen to my Firebase Storage bucket for example (for the storage superior to the Spark plan)? And it doesn't seem easy to do.
Firebase is a great product and I love how easy / fun it is to use, but now that budget locked plans as Flame are gone I feel really trapped now that my application is almost ready to go into production, and I don't think I'm the only one out there.
Ah you've stumbled onto the 'rate-limiting' conundrum. Not to worry, I've spent many nights worrying about this myself.
In order to get a bit more control over your application, you're going to have to link your project to google cloud platform. Then navigate to IAM & Admin>Quotas (once you've selected your firebase project).
Now you might be overwhelmed initially, and confused as to why there are so many Cloud functions API limiters. These quotas should allow you to rate limit your cloud functions API (similar to what twitter does) in a number of ways, including but not limited to:
Read Requests per day
Read requests per 100 seconds
Function invocations per 100 seconds
Function invocations per day
etc
The API that will be listed are the ones you've enabled, so you can set limits for cloud storage as well.
By default, the max number of invocations per second is set to the maximum of 5000 invocations per day on the spark plan. but according to the docs, the absolute maximum is 100,000,000/100 seconds!
Also worth having a look at is the pricing docs, which have a nice example of a typical monthly use case for a successful app. To grossly oversimplify, a single invocation costs $0.0000004, hence 10,000,000 invocations will cost you a whopping $3.20. However don't let that very low cost fool you, if you write some terrible code and it has exponential complexity (like reading every document in a firestore collection every invocation), you could get slapped with an exponential cost. So make sure you set those quotas :)
Remember, server admin is as much a part of the application as the code itself. If your app goes to production, be prepared to spend some time each day going through the Google cloud dashboard and checking limits, analyzing trends, etc. This way you can kind of step up the amount of invocations you can allow per day and sleep well knowing that if you shoot yourself in the foot, you won't bleed too much.
Best of luck with it
Despicable B.
I'm currently working in a social network app and I need to do a search feature. Firestore does not support these kind of queries, so I need to use an external service like Algolia.
The problem is that the free plan does not support connecting to external websites/APIs other than Google's own ones, so I can't connect to Algolia to get my search system working.
I have read multiple stories about devs paying high bills because of loops or errors in their code, and as the Blaze plan is a pay-to-go plan, they get charged what they used. If a loop generated 10TB of files they will get charged for that.
I also know that Blaze plan's features are free as long as each of them (individually) stay below the limits of the free Spark plan.
So as my question says, is there a way to set limits? For example, I would like to tell Firebase to limit my cloud functions invocations to 100k per month. That way it would be free and I would never be able to get over 100k as it's limited, which means I'll never get billed for that.
Take into account that the only thing I need right now from a paid plan is the connection to external networks. I don't need anything else as we're just starting and the app is not in production, so there's no need for huge limits.
Every Firebase project is also a Google Cloud Platform project. This means that many of the advanced features of Google Cloud Platform are also available for your Firebase project.
For example, you can set up billing alert for your Firebase project, so that you are alerted when the usage reaches a certain level. While you can't configure it to switch off the project at some point, the alert should typically be quite good for alerting you to unusual usage patterns.
For more on this see:
Tracking your spending with budgets in a recent blog post.
The GCP documentation on how to set budget alerts, which is what Firebase uses under the hood.
The GCP documentation now also has a section on capping (disabling) billing to stop usage. This is a brute force approach though and may lead to data being lost, so I'd recommend investigating all other options first.
Update (December 2020): Firebase's Todd Kerpelman just released a series of videos where he disables billing using the process from the documentation mentioned above.
You cannot set spending limits to your app now.
As of December 12, 2019, you can no longer create spending limits, but
you can change or remove existing spending limits.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit
You can create budgets, which will alert you when reaching the budget. But it won't stop the usage when hitting the budget.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets#add-new-budget
The screenshot here seems to show a Spending Limit setting for Firebase projects: Firebase: Budget and Daily Spending Limit
That settings page is located here (the Spending Limit setting apparently only shows up once you set up billing for the project): https://console.cloud.google.com/appengine/settings
It's disabled in the poster's case, but I think that's only because he connected it up to a "NodeJS App Engine app", which isn't the case for many Firebase developers.
I haven't tried it yet myself, but will do so once I start a paid plan.
EDIT: Yep, the setting shows up once you switch to a paid plan. (in my case, Blaze) I don't have enough traffic yet to confirm that it works as expected, but if I find later that it doesn't, I'll give an update here.
"This example shows you how to cap costs and stops usage for a project by disabling Cloud Billing. This will cause all Google Cloud services to terminate non-free tier services for the project."
Google Cloud Source
I am using firebase database and my question is, for example how fast can I reach 1GB if i have 100 users each storing worth 10 document pages of microsoft word full of text everyday, for one month?
Word documents would be stored in Firebase Storage, not the realtime database. Realistically, the only way you will be billed anything for using the Firebase platform is if your app gets a significant of usage. I suspect that 99% of firebase apps do not generate any billing whatsoever. ...that's just a hunch.
If you do run into billing issues, that will/would be a good thing.
Although this question is too broad since it lacks various variables like the number of users, size of the files and how this data is presented in the app I will try to give my $0.02 on this in a very generic way which can also be interpreted as how not to end up with a huge bill while using firebase,
Even though Firebase provides a sufficient space to test out the app in production there is a lot of ways in which things can go bad real quick like,
1) since firebase automatically handles the sync this additional read/write call comes out of your quota apart from the call you trigger check-out how one app developers found this out the hard way
2) if you have bad DB schema/design that you have not addressed, then you end up making multiple calls to the server to fetch the data which again bloats up the number of calls you make read about this here
3) Not setting spending limits and alerts, this should be a mandatory step to avoid a lot of the above problems even though the docs clearly gives an indication on how to set this up
These are some of the cases that I have come across I hope this serves as a guideline to set up your app