Is it safe to use firebase blaze plan?

Question

I have very simple question, never found answer for that. When are paid costs for using blaze plan? Do you buy some credit and firebase works till you have this credit? What happens when credit reaches 0 and is refilled. Does firebase start to work after that immediately?

Or do you pay after every month, based on what was used? This could bring very unpleasant surprises if you make coding mistake or become target of some hacker. One can sacrifice 100$ in credit but probably not 100000$ for some infinite loop uploading files for whole month...

Answer 1

The Firebase Blaze plan is a "pay as you go" plan, as indicated on the Firebase pricing page. It is a post-billing service, meaning that you get billed for your usage at the end of the month.

During the month, you can track your usage (and thus pricing) for the service in the Firebase Console.

If you ever get a bill for an exponentially unexpected rate, reach out to Firebase's billing team who will work with you to investigate the cause.

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If you're actively developing your code or are likely to make changes that result in infinite reads or similar operations, I'd recommend running and testing the code with the emulator suite to prevent racking up unexpected charges.

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There is an example of disabling billing to stop usage when a certain condition is hit, but it's pretty involved and comes with this warning:

This example removes Cloud Billing from your project, shutting down all resources. Resources might not shut down gracefully, and might be irretrievably deleted.