Using Firebase .getDownloadURL() Is the image display charged? - firebase

I'm using Firebase on Flutter, and I have a question.
I use the .getDownloadURL() function to get the URL of the image uploaded to the FireStore and display the image in the app as a NetworkImage(url) function.
At this time, will the firebase cost be charged?
Summary:
flutter > .getDownloadURL() > NetworkImage(url)
I'd like to know if the cost will be incurred at this time.
Please check.

Yes, beyond the free plan, downloading data from Cloud Storage through Firebase is a charged operation.
As shown in the Firebase pricing, you will be charged for the number of download operations, and for the amount of data downloaded.

Firebase has two pricing levels. The first one incorporates a limited Free tier, and it’s an excellent option for development and small applications. The second tier works on a pay as you grow model, and it’s ideal for production applications. Hopefully this will help you.
Spark Plan (Firebase free tier) is a basic plan offering 1 GB total storage, 20K writes/day, 50K reads/day, and 20K deleted/day
Blaze Plan (paid) is a pay as you go plan charging $0.18/GB for database storage, $0.026/GB for application storage, and additional charges for database operations, data transfer, etc.

Related

What is the Concurrent Users Limit for Cloud Firestore Spark Plan?

i've been searching for what is the concurrent users limit for the cloud firestore spark plan but couldn't find it.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas
It did said 1.000.000 concurrent users limit, but did not mention whether it is for the spark plan or the blaze plan. I've also tried searching answer elswhere, but did not find it answered specifically (with a source).
Help would be appreciated, thank you.
Per the Cloud Firestore pricing information (which Firebase uses):
When you use Firestore, you are charged for the following:
The number of documents you read, write, and delete.
The amount of storage that your database uses, including overhead for metadata and indexes.
The amount of network bandwidth that you use.
There is also no mention of any connection limits on Firebase's pricing page or the quotas documentation that you linked.
Unlike the Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore does not charge on a per-connection basis.
This video series also covers the ins and outs of Firebase products and is well worth sitting through.
Think of Cloud Firestore like a folder on your computer, which can contain thousands of little text files, similar to how documents in Cloud Firestore are stored. Users can update them with little chance of collision and grabbing a single document file would only require feeding 1s and 0s back to the requestor. This is why you are charged for network bandwidth rather than by individual connection.
In comparison, the RTDB was similar to one large JSON text file, with many people all trying to update it at once. Because parsing this text file on the server side was required to read and write data from it, it required compute resources to be able to do so. For this reason (among others), the number of connections the RTDB manager processes handled on behalf of spark plans were rate-limited to prevent abuse.

What are the solutions Firebase offers to reduce cost for Realtime Database?

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.

Google Firebase Cloud Storage high bandwidth cost

The problem I'm experiencing is high cost of bandwidth usage on a multi regional us bucket. Can anyone explain what this cost corresponds to? This Firebase Storage service is used for hosting asset files therefore the only operation that is required by the end user is downloading.
Additionally cost for Upload ops/Download ops/Bytes stored are practically non existent from what I see in Firebase Console.
Thanks
The main reason for a higher cost was that I had my assets stored in an additional bucket that I've created aside of the default one. As it turns out when you're utilizing additional buckets the different pricing schema is applied. Brief information in this regards can be found in Firebase pricing page under ? icon corresponding to Firebase Storage entry.
This is the estimated pricing for common usage. Firebase Storage free
limits are enforced daily and refreshed at midnight Pacific Time. In
the Blaze plan, fees for Firebase Storage are based on usage volume.
Firebase Storage usage fees are processed as Google Cloud App Engine
usage fees for the default bucket, and Google Cloud Storage usage fees
for any additional buckets. For more information, see pricing for
Google Cloud App Engine and Storage.
Additionally, prior to my current implementation of assets cloud fetching, I had it done via publicly accessible HTTP protocol (there are many Youtube clips which "teach" this approach). I'm not quite sure but that might've had an impact on a pricing schema as well (it's a little bit too convoluted reading Google's documentation in this regards and understanding all the terminology). On top of that this approach presented security threat as the urls were publicly accessible to anyone - in order to prevent it one should always think of some kind of authorization mechanism.

What is the maximum number of Firebase shards we can have?

As the title say: What is the maximum number of Firebase shards we can have?
I just realized that one Firebase database is not going to cut it for my project, because the real-time DB price scales very harshly. I could avoid the issue by having one main DB where I go on Blaze and a very large amount of small DB instances on spark. Alternatively, I could use storage (which scales much better), but I'd have to do some significant change in how my program works.
There is an undocumented limit to the number of projects you can have on the free/Spark plan. The number depends on the reputation of your account on the Google Cloud Platform. Since Firebase projects are also GCP projects, the limit covers both your Firebase and (plain) GCP projects.
There is no known limit to the number of projects you can have on a paid plan.

Is Firebase Blaze storage and database pricing billed as full GB (downloaded + stored)?

Everything here https://firebase.google.com/pricing/ that says "/GB" in Blaze plan, if I have less than GB will the price be calculated lower (like Amazon Web Service's) or billed as full GB?
Want to move from AWS but my app has rather small database/storage but requires large amount of access that it exceeded Spark plan. It would be a shame if Firebase bill me full $5 for realtime database that have barely anything. (In that case stick with AWS might be better)
I know this should go to their support but unfortunately this page https://firebase.google.com/support/ told me to come here, and their direct support is capped at 5 times per year..
Prorated. Calculated lower.
Storage charges are prorated on a per-object basis
https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing
(referenced as "2) This is the estimated pricing for common usage. Firebase Storage free limits are enforced daily and refreshed at midnight Pacific Time. In the Blaze plan, fees for Firebase Storage are based on usage volume. Firebase Storage usage fees are processed as Google Cloud Storage usage fees. For more information, see Google Cloud Storage Pricing." in the fine print)

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