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Trying to use Firebase is the most horrible experience in my life

29 points by crackerJack68 ↗ HN
I was trying to use FlutterFlow as I like it very much but it keeps asking for Firebase access and so I attempted to setup a Firebase account for the client I am developing for and this is what I get: Sorry we cannot create an account at this time, please Contact Support, we are unable to create billing profiles at this time.

SO tell me, what if I build my business on this platform and it does this?! and guess what?! Noone to call, no phone number and when you click on the link that says Get Support it dumps you at some generic support portal with no instructions. Firebase is 100% crap. I need to find an alternative to use with Flutter.

22 comments

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cweagans
Try pocketbase. There’s a Dart client for it and it’s all open source. Very impressive software imo.
boringuser2
You should probably be a little careful in general with these low-code solutions that pretend they can make engineering decisions for you.
loeber
Yes, Firebase is junk. It has never been clear to me why anyone uses it.
promiseofbeans
Becuase you need to use it for push notifications on Android nowadays
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
gregjor
If that small inconvenience represents the most horrible experience in your life, you must have an exceptionally charmed life.
agvxov
you must be fun at parties
phmqk76
How droll, Greg. How droll.
readthenotes1
So at least one person here doesn't know what droll means.

You're getting my upvote because you were able to control yourself and not say get off my lawn.

Also, you said what I was going to say.

Finally, I wonder if the author is using the literary technique called "hyperbole"? These days, it is hard to know.

phmqk76
You could even say that I was employing irony by calling his humorless comment “droll.” I don’t mean “you,” per se, because you find it hard to know if the author was using hyperbole or was conveying that this was, in fact, the most horrible experience of his life.

Do you know what “pedantic” means? And do you think maybe you’re being… that?

gregjor
Yes, thanks for the English lessons, and for draining what little humor one might find in the exchange.
drewcoo
Go sleep it off, sock puppet of the original "droll"-sayer account.

That's not what droll means. That's not what irony means. But you have pedantic nailed. As well as un-funny "sarcasm", the word you were probably struggling after . . .

gregjor
I interpret the “most horrible experience in my life” as hyperbole, but I don’t know for sure. The OP did take the time to post a long-ish complaint after all.

This kind of routine friction ranks above breaking a shoelace, but just barely. We can all sympathize, I’m sure. No need for the public whinging.

phmqk76
We may never know for sure if using Firebase was, indeed, literally the most horrible experience of Cracker Jack’s life. I mean, the rest of us do, of course, because we don’t have the emotional intelligence of a gnat.
bdcravens
Firebase is pretty ridiculous. It's like if Seth MacFarlane did a skit about Javascript and the cloud.

If I had to go with something like Firebase, I'd stand up a Supabase instance. At least then I'd know I had control over the backend, being based on Postgres. (Though I'd rather just code to the RDBMS directly, sticking with what's stable, not what's cool)

cobertos
I wouldn't touch Firebase. I've had issues with lost data and unexpected/unknown BigQuery bills. Very unintuitive and a ton of footguns, no support
alanlbird
I'm a bit surprised at the negativity here. I have used Firebase for 11 projects and have had no issues at all. I love that I can quickly and easily set up services that work well together.

For most projects I use the realtime database and authentication. The database is very fast and the realtime feature is essential for some of my projects. Authentication is free no matter how many monthly users I have.

I also use storage and hosting, where I get excellent performance.

All but one of my projects work within the free tier. The one project that sometimes exceeds the free tier is generally less than $1 per month. My projects are fairly small, but I know that for large projects, there might be more economical solutions somewhere else.

For me, I would highly recommend Firebase to other developers.

BandButcher
2nd this haha, firebase wasnt always a google product...they ended up buying them out because it was a truly innovative framework (at the time). How they've maintained the product since is debatable but the tech is solid.

I've used firebase for many apps - albeit not enterprise level - and they have been very performant and efficient. No issues tbh. But ive never paid for firebase so i cannot speak to the paid teir.

All it is under the hood is websockets, no sql db, oauth, and html/js. Yes you COULD write those integrations yourself, but doing it for many apps or for POCs would be tedious and difficult to maintain. firebase was a great playground to go from idea to code to prod quickly.

Is it the best cloud solution for enterprise production or multi tenant saas platforms... Probably not lol

BandButcher
I have several "prod" websites using Firebase. However i wrote them 5-7years ago so im sure the framework has changed a lot since.

its a solid framework for real time db and hosting but imo its struggling to keep up with competitors (aws, cloudflare, pocketbase, and my current fav supabase)

My bet is that google is shifting money and engineering time towards AI hype as opposed to firebase cloud infrastructure. Also they bought out firebase way back and googlefied it, then i guess you're seeing the final result

tldr: check out supabase