Is there a way to set a spend limit, so that the site goes down rather than incur additional spend?
Like many others, I did not realize until the recent incident that the $0 “Starter” plan still means you can get billed arbitrary amounts.
There have been many threads recently about this, but all of them have been closed without any resolution — the official reply from the Netlify CEO only talks of “mistakes” and “DDoS”, but not legitimate (but unexpected) traffic causing high spend.
Examples:
So just for once, can we get clarity/confirmation that even a “Starter” Netlify account can get arbitrarily high spend, and there’s no mechanism to prevent this? Even without giving any payment information to Netlify at any point, one can still get a bill for tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars?
Thank you. I just looked up Cloudflare Pages and they have a “Fail Closed” option (Pricing · Cloudflare Pages docs) so I’ll be moving all my Netlify Pages over. Thanks for the clear answer.
Yeah good point, but the same Cloudflare page also says “On both free and paid plans, requests to static assets are free and unlimited” which seems a bit too good to be true, but a bit more reassuring than the Netlify “Starter” (which I had mistakenly thought of as “Free”) plan.
@shreevatsa There is an open ‘Feature Request’ regarding this here, and Netlify have given some indication they’re working on something related.
To be fair to Netlify, if you don’t intended to ever spend any money with them, then I can’t imagine it’s a great loss for them that you move your sites elsewhere.
Netlify as a business can offer the plans & inclusions they want to offer, and I don’t believe it’s right for the wider developer community to try and bully them into a situation where they need to dedicate time and money into providing you a solution that allows you to not pay them.
It simply doesn’t make any sense.
Spend limits for paying customers does make sense.
If Netlify want to make adjustments so that there is an “entirely free account” (and it makes sense for them to do so for some other reason, e.g. marketing), then that’s up to them, but non-paying customers threatening to leave if they can’t use their plans entirely for free is a bit silly.
That said, host wherever suits you best!
If what Cloudflare Pages offers is a good fit, and you can get that free lunch with no risk, that’s awesome.
The more options there are for developers, and businesses keeping each other honest, the better it is for us little people.
Sorry but it’s absolutely right that the community calls out a situation where a company is trying to obfuscate the financial risks people take on for what is essentially a trial.
The whole point of the free tier is a gamble on their part on whether you’re successful as a business, not to profit from situations where end users are billed for illegitimate or erroneous traffic.The two aren’t the same at all. So no, this isn’t a case that people are trying to avoid paying Netlify for legitimate traffic, they’re trying to implement a basic feature whose omission Netlify is using to price gouge their customers
I don’t believe it’s right for the wider developer community to try and bully them into a situation where they need to dedicate time and money into providing you a solution that allows you to not pay them.
Sorry but it’s absolutely right that the community calls out a situation where a company is not only trying to obfuscate the financial risks people take on for what is essentially a trial, but actively hamper efforts to minimise that risk by removing basic protections.
The whole point of the free tier is a gamble on their part on whether you’re successful as a business, not to profit from situations where end users are billed for illegitimate or erroneous traffic.The two aren’t the same at all, and non paying customers are still valuable. So no, this isn’t a case that a “worthless” subset of customers are trying to avoid paying Netlify for legitimate traffic, they’re trying to implement a basic feature whose omission Netlify is using to price gouge their customers, and are losing paying customers by doing so.
Framing it as a “free lunch” is just a strawman. (I pay for a VPS but now wouldn’t touch Vercel or Netlify without something as basic as a cap)
@nickwoodward It’s not a case that Netlify have removed anything, the stated “basic protections” have never existed, and Netlify’s closest equivalent competitor Vercel didn’t have them either.
You’re effectively claiming it is an intentional nefarious omission, but it’s much more likely an omission by lack of priority, as it takes time and money to implement features.
Netlify’s (eventual) response indicated that’s not their intention either.
I’d go a bit further myself, I don’t believe anyone should ever incur “usage” (billed or otherwise) for illegitimate or erroneous usage of any billable resource against a Netlify site.
Can you provide more detail for this specific claim?
Evidence of the customers that have been gouged, and paying customers that have left?
I have seen paying customers raise questions, but I’ve not seen any threatening to leave.
The loudest threats to leave posted to these forums have come from users saying they’re on the Starter Plan.
It’s not a straw man, primarily because it’s not an argument.
It’s in reference to the good deal that Cloudflare Pages is, and the fact that just like Netlify’s Starter Plan all of these “introduction plans” are engineered in precisely that manner, where the intention is to get you to spend on something else.
The only straw man argument that I see is the users that are conflating “excessive erroneous or nefarious usage” and “site protection” with “being billed for legitimate usage, at clearly advertised prices, on an introduction plan”.
The community is right to:
call out Netlify for shady behavior (the first email back from the support team member saying they usually charge 20% and asking for 5% springs to mind).
demand to not incur ‘charges’ from illegitimate sources of traffic and better site protections.
make a feature request for better self-service spend management, this is especially applicable for paying customers.
That they’ve never implemented a feature doesn’t prohibit it from being an essential one.
And you can’t have it both ways - either it’s essential to them that the free tier can overspend, or it just simply isn’t prioritised. So yes, I’m obviously concluding that they’re deprioritising financial controls for the exact reason you’ve said they shouldn’t have to implement them: money.
Yeah, I’m going to rely on Netlify’s actions, not their belated PR. They do profit off illegitimate traffic. They don’t refund it in every case. Their literal policy involves charging people for illegitimate traffic. And finally: The lack of spending controls strongly suggest they aren’t concerned that they do profit from it.
1: The policy they tried to implement of charging 20% for illegitimate traffic.
2: I’ve seen several influencers move projects from cloud platforms - not just netlify - after the 104k scandal. Think the Syntax pod did a piece on selfhosting in response, and I’ve seen a large number of posts about it on reddit and in discord. This will have had an impact on their future customer base.
It absolutely is. You were making the argument that this tier doesn’t make sense for Netlify and that those who just want a “free lunch” can go to Cloudflare pages.
Great. Except
a) It does benefit Netlify. and
b) Customers on the free tier aren’t all just after a “free lunch”. So stop trying to devalue the argument by suggesting these customers aren’t worthwhile.
Where? Where have you seen that? Because I haven’t once, and I’ve been reading about this for several days now. People are looking for actual spending caps to prevent against illegitimate traffic.
Netlify are literally banking on the future success and traffic of your website. They want to hook you as a developer, knowing that you’ll likely host a fair number of paying clients in the future. As such they’re willing to provide a free account when you start out. That’s the trade off they’ve decided to make. They don’t then get to complain they aren’t, or can’t, milk those accounts that haven’t blown up on the free tier - which is in essence the argument you’re making
This idea that people want spend caps to dodge any cost at all just isn’t borne out by how people have responded. People aren’t concerned if they go $10 over their usual bill, they’re concerned they’ll go $1000 over. And at “clearly advertised prices”? I mean seriously. We’re obviously on different planets at this point.
Your argument seems to come from a place of “they should be able to make money off of the free tier”. My response is: They are. If they aren’t making enough they can change those tiers. What they can’t do is be surprised when people clock exactly why they haven’t implemented basic features.
I’m not surprised you conclude that, as it fits the narrative you’re trying to build, but I’m sure you’re aware it’s a false equivalence. A feature doesn’t have to be actively de-prioritized to not gain enough attention to be implemented.
Especially factoring in that Netlify are servicing a range of customers with a limited team size, a feature deemed “essential” by users on the Starter Plan may not carry much weight for the customers on an Enterprise plan.
Factoring in that there is no “free tier”, it doesn’t have to be retro-actively framed as a campaign of malfeasance or neglect to end up in this situation.
This isn’t direct evidence, as it’s not proof of someone having been charged it.
Considering it was clearly “illegitimate traffic” It’s absolutely an awful look.
However something I’m not sure anyone has considered, is it’s also entirely possible the “20% policy” mentioned was something Netlify have applied for legitimate traffic.
Meaning customers that incurred big overages at the stated price of $55 per 100gb may have paid closer to $11 per 100gb.
I have no evidence of that being the case.
Either Netlify or users that have been charged various fees would need to provide more detail.
This also isn’t direct evidence.
People move projects around all the time for a multitude of reasons and “influencers” in particular like to stoke the fires and join any pitchfork wielding mob they can to get more eyeballs.
It absolutely isn’t, because (and I know I’m repeating myself), it wasn’t an argument.
Something cannot be a “straw man argument” if it’s not an argument.
It is a statement of objective fact that these “introduction plans” are configured so that while you don’t pay for X you do pay for Y.
You’re framing it as me saying “people that just want a free lunch should go elsewhere, go to Cloudflare Pages”, but that’s neither what I said or what I was trying to express. I was just stating that the “Cloudflare Pages” product is also a “Free Lunch” whereby they hope to gain you as a customer and charge you for “something else”.
I’ve never stated that, please quote me directly where I said that.
The tier as already structured does make sense, or they wouldn’t have offered it for so many years.
I’ve made an argument that structuring it in a way it hasn’t been offered, may not make sense.
Again, please quote me directly where I said this.
I could provide you more, but you could also see it yourself by reading the threads I’ve cross linked in here, (I don’t have the time available to compile it for you right now - but could later this week), but here’s a great example:
This isn’t a request for protection from illegitimate traffic, or for “spending controls” (to keep to a budget), it’s a request to ensure the “Starter Plan” becomes a “Free Plan”:
is there a way to prevent getting charged on a free plan? Ideally, Netlify should have an option to disable free plan websites, in case the free plan limits are reached.
That’s not the argument I’m making, you’ve actually explained the argument I’ve made:
It’s a “Starter Plan” that just happens to start free, if you exceed limits you incur charges.
It isn’t advertised as a “Free Plan”, but it would become one for many people if they were able to cap their spend at $0.
See the above that I quoted, I can find you more, but I’d prefer if you did so yourself, (I’ve linked many threads together so they’re fairly easy to locate).
Overwhelmingly the people that responded on the forums when the drama first occurred were seeking to cap their Starter Plan to ensure they never incur any charges.
I’m not sure what sources you’re looking at, but there is absolutely more evidence (on these forums) of people on the “Starter Plan” expecting to be able to lock it to “free” than there are expressions from paying customers looking for account spend protection.
Sorry I’m not understanding, are you indicating the pricing page isn’t clear enough?
I made my own statement because I can show you evidence where customers have claimed they didn’t see that the “Starter Plan” could cost them money. I think the pricing page is pretty clear (it could definitely be better), but I don’t think it’s much different from other equivalent providers.
