
Ask HN: Side project went viral, now Google is charging me $1k. Help? - bennettfeely
About two years ago I hacked together a side project (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bennettfeely.com&#x2F;antiweather) that compares the weather at your location and the exact opposite point on Earth.<p>It uses the (affordable) Dark Sky API to get the weather forecast at two antipodes and Google&#x27;s Reverse Geocoding API to simply get the geographic name of a coordinate.<p>The project was live then but never received much traffic until it was posted on &#x2F;r&#x2F;InternetIsBeautiful yesterday.<p>Now I see I am being charged a little over $1,000 from Google for using their API.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I don&#x27;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?
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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?

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mgliwka
A free OpenStreetMap based alternative you could use to keep it running in the
future:

[http://photon.komoot.de/](http://photon.komoot.de/)

[http://photon.komoot.de/reverse?lon=10&lat=52](http://photon.komoot.de/reverse?lon=10&lat=52)

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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!

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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.

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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?

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verdverm
If this is a first time, Google will make one time refunds if you reach out to
billing

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paulbishop
hmm me thinks ya business model should have absorbed this and turned it into
revenue?

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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.

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crobertsbmw
For real. Sometimes people just want to build something and put it out there
for the fun of sharing something cool.

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villgax
Nope, you should have anticipated & used better alternatives. Just apply the
same in the real world & you'll see how your approach changes.

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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.

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

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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.

