Netlify Billing Request: Extra Bandwidth Allowances

Dear Netlify,

Over the last few months I’ve been very fortunate to have my website, www.jvt.me, receive a lot of traffic.

I’m a very happy Netlify customer because Netlify’s free 100GB of data has been able to support this very well, and the few times I’ve gone over that 100GB allowance, and have been automagically billed for an extra allowance.

However, these extra 100GB allowances have usually been in the last couple of days of my billing cycle, which means I only use 2-3GB of the 100GB. This costs me $20, which isn’t super cheap if it’s less than 5% used, especially as it’s happened a couple of times in a row for similar usage amounts!

I would request that either Netlify allow for the allowance to rollover into the next month, so that $20 isn’t immediately wasted, or that there’s some ability to add a smaller increment of bandwidth allowance. Above the free tier is a $45/month plan, which is pretty expensive for a regular increased increment, so having a plan in between would be nice, too.

Many thanks in advance, Jamie
(A copy of this can be found at Netlify Billing Request: Extra Bandwidth Allowances · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)

Hi Jamie, thanks for your thoughtful post and we’re stoked you are enjoying Netlify.

At this point in time, to the best of my knowledge (I don’t make decisions about this, so subject to change) we’re not planning to introduce a intermediate tier or allow for rollover any time soon.

Bummer, I know. I think that taking a closer look at your traffic might be helpful - 100GB is quite a generous allowance, and unless you were moving a lot of data around or serving a LOT of pages, I would assume that with a fairly simple site layout as the one I’m seeing at the URL you provided, you shouldn’t be hitting that ceiling. Especially as you noted that it only happens sometimes.

We can definitely give you some pointers as to how to analyze your bandwidth usage and maybe shave it down a bit if you’d like, that’s totes doable.

Let me know what you think.

While Perry has indeed described our intended/intentional business practices, the feature request is reasonable and I have filed it for consideration by our product and finance teams.

Should they make a final decision (yea or nay), I’ll get back to you in this thread.

2 Likes

That’d be greatly appreciated! I run Matomo analytics on the site, and from that I can see ~48k site hits over the year, and I know there are some automated processes that scrape my site too which won’t get picked up by my analytics.

Here are some of your top URL’s by # of requests:

However, if we sum by # of bytes sent, the story is pretty clearly: “reduce your profile pic and feed.xml file sizes”:

Thanks, that’s super helpful! I’ll look at what I can do to try and reduce those down.

Not sure about my RSS feed as I’m not sure if pagination works properly for that / if clients would understand it - the main issue is there’s lots of content on the site!