ServerlessHorrors ServerlessHorrors is a blog dedicated to sharing terrifying stories related to serverless services, focusing on unexpected high costs and failures that developers have experienced. --- About Described as "Stories you never want to feel on your own skin." Created by Andras (Twitter), who is working on Coolify, an open-source, self-hostable alternative to Heroku, Netlify, and Vercel (coolify.io). Invites readers to share their own horror stories via Twitter or by opening a pull request on GitHub: ServerlessHorrors GitHub. --- Recent Posts and Stories The blog lists various real-life horror stories involving huge unexpected bills from popular serverless platforms. These stories illustrate the risks and surprises of using serverless services: Billing Horror Stories ~$1189.42/month (May 2025) Webflow charged an exorbitant $1189.42 for a plan supposed to cost $69/month due to bandwidth issues. Tags: webflow, bandwidth, image $100,000.42 (May 2025) A semi-popular WebGL game upload site was hit by a DoS attack, resulting in a $100k single-day Firebase bill. Tags: google, storage, firebase $738.42 (Apr 2025) Despite a $20/month subscription and a $120 spend limit, a Vercel user was surprised by a much higher bill. Tags: vercel, bandwidth, vercels-mistake, spending-limit $70,000.69 (Jan 2025) A $50/month Firebase project user woke to a $70k bill unexpectedly. Tags: google, storage, firebase, gcs $22,639.69 (Jan 2025) A user faced a $22k+ bill from using BigQuery on a public dataset in the playground. Tags: google, bigquery, sql $250/month (Jan 2025) Pay $250 monthly for 9,000 page visits, equating to $3,000 per year with Framer due to bandwidth and media usage. Tags: framer, bandwidth, images and videos $1,273.69 (Jan 2025) An AI named Devin made a codebase change causing unexpected costs with Posthog. Tags: posthog, devin, ai, cognition-labs, new $530.19 (Jan 2025) A Posthog user was suddenly billed $530 despite no prior charges. Tags: posthog, events, new $383.69 (Sep 2024) An almost $400 bill appeared for a documentation site hosted on Mintlify. Tags: mintlify, ai, documentation $103.26 (Jun 2024) AWS free tier user surprised by a $103 bill due to "dark pattern" practices. Tags: aws, dark-pattern, free-tier $96,280.69 (Jun 2024) A massive unexpected bandwidth charge from Vercel surprised a user. Tags: vercel, bandwidth, new $120,000.42 (May 2024) Cloudflare forced a company to pay $120k within 24 hours, shutting down their site due to billing issues. Tags: cloudflare, bandwidth $1,300.69 (Apr 2024) An AWS S3 bucket was misused in a DDoS attack causing a $1300+ bill. Tags: aws, s3, security, ddos $11,000.69 (Mar 2024) $11k was spent on Mailgun emails sent during a DoS attack, coupled with database loss. Tags: ddos, mailgun $104,500.12 (Feb 2024) An email from Netlify revealed a $104,500 overdue bill due to bandwidth and DDoS issues. Tags: netlify, bandwidth, ddos $23,000.42 (Feb 2024) EchoFox's Vercel bill spiked to $23k due to spam attacks causing many accounts and trials. Tags: vercel, bandwidth, ddos $3,000.69 (Apr 2023) Warning for Vercel users about expensive tests or deployments causing unexpected $3k+ bills. Tags: vercel, bandwidth, wrong-implementation $620.12 (Jan 2023) A sitemap.txt file usage led to hundreds of GB-hours bandwidth consumption on Vercel causing a big bill. Tags: vercel, bandwidth $72,000.99 (Mar 2020) A $72k bill accrued testing Firebase and Cloud Run due to recursion and wrong implementation nearly causing bankruptcy. Tags: google, firebase, cloudrun,