Comment by mmaunder

1 year ago

Netlify charge $55 per 100GB for overages on their starter plan. Keep in mind that they’re being billed by their provider at 95th percentile billing. That means they have ports running at say 100 gigabits per second and have a commit of say 50 gb/s and they’re billed a flat rate for that as long as they don’t go over. Because they’re billed 95th percentile they can spike their connection traffic massively for 5% of the time and not get billed more. So Netlify themselves have a safety net and don’t need real-time monitoring to immediately cut their usage. And of course any spikes from a single user are massively diluted among their entire user base. So, yeah, they’re gouging big time.

What they should have is monitoring per user and a default that 503s the site with no overages that has to be proactively disabled by the user. Instead they’re just letting it ride and trying their luck by negotiating down the overage charge to what they think the user can stomach.

It's also worth pointing out that Netlify's pricing of $550 per 1TB is 5x more than AWS, Google Cloud, and other massive cloud providers charge, and those are already known for extortionate data transfer fees (50-100x more than more reasonable providers).