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Ask HN: Side project went viral, now Google is charging me $1k. Help?

18 points by bennettfeely ↗ HN
About two years ago I hacked together a side project (https://bennettfeely.com/antiweather) that compares the weather at your location and the exact opposite point on Earth.

It uses the (affordable) Dark Sky API to get the weather forecast at two antipodes and Google's Reverse Geocoding API to simply get the geographic name of a coordinate.

The project was live then but never received much traffic until it was posted on /r/InternetIsBeautiful yesterday.

Now I see I am being charged a little over $1,000 from Google for using their API.

I wish I kept a closer eye on the fact Google jacked up the price of their APIs since I released Antiweather two years ago.

Maybe someone can help me understand why it costs 50x more to simply get the name of a location (Google) than it does to get detailed weather conditions and forecast for any point on Earth (Dark Sky).

I don't feel much hope of finding a way around this surprise bill but I am posting here for any advice at all. Is there any chance at forgiveness for a recent college grad whose side project unintentionally went viral, anyone to contact?

13 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] thread
villgax
Nope, you should have anticipated & used better alternatives. Just apply the same in the real world & you'll see how your approach changes.
Jugurtha
There are people who think of contingencies for an eventually popular product, and people who build actually popular products to think of contingencies for.

Contingengies are things like business models, scalability, high availability, and big data. People who obsess about these before something even exists tend to do so in meetings solely to utter words that keep them on a large organization's payroll.

villgax
Woah, you went all abstract real quick. You really want this dude to think there are free lunches?
Jugurtha
>Woah, you went all abstract real quick. You really want this dude to think there are free lunches?

Not really. I've seen people brainstorm something, and before even validating the need or the prototype, they start talking about millions of concurrent connections and scalability. They would then decide they need to do it in Scala or Erlang, use Kafka, and spend time learning a new stack for high availability, concurrency, fault-tolerance, and all the nice words, and lose years of engineering time.

All that before they even have one user or one connection. Sure, if one has spent 10 years with that stack and that's the one they used to make the prototype, then I agree. But if they're switching because they want to be ready for the "millions of users who'll use the app", that's just statistically silly.

jnfr
First of all, congratulations! That's really exciting!

This is a costly mistake to learn, but to offer a bit of hope, at my last start-up we accidentally racked up high costs on the location API. Our CEO hopped on the phone with them a few times and was able to get the bill down. Good luck!

paulbishop
hmm me thinks ya business model should have absorbed this and turned it into revenue?
iamben
I've built many side projects with absolutely no "business model". Sometimes it's just fun to make something for the fun and the learns. I think people forget that.

It's exciting to see people using these things, but a 1k bill would suck. It's definitely a learning experience, but saying "you should have had a different business model" is a little unfair. If we started every project thinking like that the internet would miss a load of the interesting, weird stuff it has.

crobertsbmw
For real. Sometimes people just want to build something and put it out there for the fun of sharing something cool.
Quequau
Have you considered asking the moderators of /r/InternetIsBeautiful if you could make a post explaining what happened and asking for some crowd funding?
crispyporkbites
Call Google and I'm sure they'll sort it out

Oh wait, that's not the way Google does support. What you should do is get someone with lots of twitter followers to tweet @google until someone notices this and solves it for you.

Not everyone has enough followers to activate this channel, but surely you know someone who works at Google or has 100k followers?

dyeje
First, find a cheaper API that accomplishes the same goal. Second, email Google billing and see if they're willing to give a discount considering the accidental and non-commercial nature of the charge.
verdverm
If this is a first time, Google will make one time refunds if you reach out to billing