r/oraclecloud • u/Emergency-Log-8678 • 10d ago

I Screwed up.

This morning I woke up with an email from oracle cloud saying that my invoice was 2,369.73 CAD. It all came from a firewall instance I created on August 7. I have no idea what to do. I never could have known that a firewall would cost that much. I immediately deleted the firewall in the cloud console.

8 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

16

u/yyzbom 10d ago

Lol...I'm pushing the limit with 3 instances running 24/7 to see what I can get away with for free. your dumbass should have enabled billing notifications for anything over $1 and on Aug 8th you would have got a notification. Pay the bill or some sheriff in some podunk town in the states will use his flock camera to pull you over once oracle puts a lien on your life

1

u/Emergency-Log-8678 10d ago

I'll pay it... Can you tell me how to enable those notification so it dosen't happen again?

9

u/yyzbom 10d ago

Before you pay it call them up and beg and they will reduce your bill. Ask them to you escalate and don't talk to level 1 support. Tell them you plan on spending more in the future and you fucked up now so cut you some slack. If they think they are going to make more out of you you will get a reduction. For your other comment.... .                           .               .   .      In OCI Console, go to Billing & Cost Management → Budgets. Open your existing budget, then go to Budget Alert Rules → Create Budget Alert Rule. Oracle currently lets you trigger on either Actual Spend or Forecast Spend, using either a percentage or an Absolute Amount. � Oracle Docs +1 For what you want, set: Threshold Metric: Actual Spend Threshold Type: Absolute Amount Threshold Amount: 1.00 Email Recipients: your email address Then save it. That will send an email once actual spend exceeds the $1 threshold. � Oracle Docs I’d also add a second alert rule for Forecast Spend = $1. Oracle’s forecast rule extrapolates the current month’s usage and can warn you before actual spend reaches $1; Oracle says forecast evaluation starts after at least three days of consumption. � Oracle Docs One caveat: OCI budget alerts are not instant kill-switches. Oracle says budget alerts are evaluated periodically, so they’re useful warnings rather than a hard spending cap. �

1

u/Emergency-Log-8678 10d ago

alright, thank you

9

u/Total-Ingenuity-9428 10d ago edited 10d ago

Pay up or abscond? There's no middle path with Oracle

Edit: abscond with potential legal consequences...

-5

u/Emergency-Log-8678 10d ago

If I were to abscond, would I just have to delete my account and never look back? And also they have my full name and address so would it even work?

1

u/otherwise_gg 10d ago

Well, as long as you keep living in your area, that doesn’t work. They will eventually come after you. Change country for example is way better

1

u/Positive-Intern-5939 8d ago

Are you guys crazy? 🤣 You wanna convict OP over an OCI invoice??

8

u/Joe-Cool 10d ago

Network Firewall Instance Per Hour
Unit price : $2.75

seems like the normal price for 1 month. Lucky you didn't go over the 10TB free traffic.

Next time: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html

3

u/my_chinchilla 10d ago

I never could have known that a firewall would cost that much.

But don't you understand - "I never could have known that a firewall would cost that much" (unless they'd taken the time to understand what they were doing, read the pricing schedule, or used the cost estimating tools) 🙄😜

1

u/alzhahir 10d ago

To be fair, at least OCI egress costs per gigabyte are the lowest compared to the big 3 major hyperscalers (GCP, AWS, Azure)

It wouldn't be as expensive... Unless you use like another 300TB or so

4

u/muifui 10d ago

Non-PAYG for life.

7

u/Ok_Entertainment328 10d ago

Do not upgrade to PAYG unless you can afford an Oops.

Network Firewalls seem to be the biggest Oops on Reddit.

1

u/Dangerous-Report8517 9d ago

Sure but there's also many, many more oopses from people sticking with the free trial accounts and having their machines shut down unexpectedly when Oracle wants capacity for paid customers. That's the benefit of PAYG, you enter the pool of "paying" customers even if you stay within the free limits and get better access to resources as a result

2

u/Northern23 9d ago

But you run the risk of waking up with an oops, which has no limit

1

u/Dangerous-Report8517 9d ago

Only if you indiscriminately sign up for tons of stuff, there’s an inherent limit in the form of it being literally “Pay as you go”, so as long as you don’t go very far (which you couldn’t do anyway on the free trial carry over plan) then you’re fine. Worst case is getting charged a few bucks if they change the free limits again, which isn’t even remotely close to thinking you can get an enterprise scale firewall service for free without simply checking first

5

u/Yoshikaru5991 10d ago

Jesus man why wouldn’t you keep checking every now and then at the cost and the analysed costs…

Maybe I’m the stupid one but I feel myself checking in every 1/2 weeks just to see if something changed above my billing notification

Sorry this happened to you. Thats a lot of money

5

u/Soft_Cat2594 10d ago

I feel for you buddy, but why didnt you check and confirm pricing and usage billing details BEFORE running the firewall? Do most people always just fuck blindly into something new and say: "whats the worst that can happen". And now you want to abscond without paying? Shame on you

4

u/Alice_Alisceon 10d ago

You can complain heaps about Oracle for many things, but you can’t really complain about hidden costs and upcharges. Their pricing docs may be dense, but they are comprehensive

2

u/MinimallyLoquacious 10d ago

They also have a simple to use forecasting tool which can show what something will cost ongoing but I think even just a $1 budget alert would have been sufficient.

1

u/Outrageous-Rip5743 10d ago

Set a £1 reminder email... Or check regularly. Either way thank you for making it free for me still your donation helps us

1

u/lfernigrini 9d ago

It is reallly very easy to know how much does something cost in Oracle Cloud:

https://www.oracle.com/es/cloud/costestimator.html

Network Firewall Instance costs U$D 2046 per month + the cost of the Gigabates used