Is there a way to limit Firebase's Blaze plan?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

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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.