Crazy, Unexplained New Charges - Workers?

[imappoet]

I signed up for a Workers Unlimited plan at the start of October and created a couple of small static test sites with no real traffic - I use WordPress a lot, so, I planned to write a tutorial about using Workers Sites to host sites generated with WP2Static.

Suddenly, two months later, on the 1st of December, I got an invoice with unexplained, unlisted charges, simply added to the usual “Current charges”, alongside my usual domain renewal costs. Then an even bigger one on the 2nd, and yet another on the 3rd.

$45.15 was charged to my card on Tuesday and, just a few minutes ago, another $32.12 was charged. That may not sound like much to most of you, but this is the account I use for food and rent. It is a debit card with no credit facility. I am terrified that some sort of Cloudflare billing error is going to wipe me out and I would be able to get anyone there to tell me what they are billing me for.

As far as I can see, my Workers usage has remained steady for the previous two months at under 100,000 requests per month, less than 1% of 10m requests that my $5 per month Unlimited plan allows. I have changed nothing in recent weeks, but these crazy bills started on the 1st of this month.

My only other Cloudflare transactions are for domain renewals, and they are simple to track. So, has something changed in how Workers are billed?

As far as I know, I am using no other billable Cloudflare services and, again, nothing has changed in recent weeks, only these crazy invoices every day so far this month.

My Workers usage in November, 95k requests, less than 1% of my plan allowance:

… and my Workers usage so far in December, on track for roughly the same:

I have contacted Cloudflare Support and, after 24 hours, was told that the my ticket will be forwarded to Billing. As more charges roll in, I am not too reassured because, in the past, I have found them distinctinctly unenthusiastic about fixing even really obvious domain billing errors.

In this case, I do not even know what is happening, so, I would be very grateful for any advice or insights.

[adaptive]

Workers Sites takes advantage of Workers and Workers KV.
Part of the billing could be the usage of Workers KV.

Can you post here the graph of Billing Cloudflare Workers KV operations?

Then on the Domain > Analytics > Workers > Workers KV (per account)

• bandwidth
• requests
• storage

Pricing

Your $5 Workers monthly base charge includes:

• 1 GB of Worker KV storage
• 10 million Worker KV reads per month
• 1 million Worker KV writes per month
• 1 million Worker KV deletes per month
• 1 million Worker KV list operations per month

Additional KV operations are priced as follows:

• $0.50 per GB of additional Worker KV storage per month
• $0.50 per million additional Worker KV reads
• $5.00 per million additional Worker KV writes
• $5.00 per million additional Worker KV deletes
• $5.00 per million additional Worker KV list operations

Usage of all other features of Worker KV do not affect pricing.

[imappoet]

@adaptive, thanks so much for pointing me towards that, I had no idea Workers data would be located in each domains’s Analytics section rather than each domain’s Workers section.

I could be misinterpreting, but it appears that, regardless of which of the 3 main domains I access them from, the Workers metrics are the same, so, I presume that “per account” means these are all cumulative, covering all the little tests I ran anywhere within this Cloudflare account.

KV Requests …. under 15K per month

KV Bandwidth … Total storage read (all sites) 365.13 MB

KV Storage 55.48

So, if I’m not wildly miscalculating, that usage should be comfortably within the base charge’s included allowances. Storage is well below 1 GB and I’m nowhere close to a million for everything else. I’m not sure about the 365.13 MB bandwidth, that doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the plan details, but surely that would be a ridiculous limitation.

What sticks out to me is that the usage has not changed much, so, surely if I was over-using some resource I would have been hit by these charges last month or the month before.

This gives me hope that it is, indeed, some sort of billing error.

[adaptive]

What does your invoice state?
Just copy the relevant info, omit any information that is sensitive.

[imappoet]

That is the problem, it does not state anything about what these additional charges are for.

So, the main charges listed on my invoices are domain renewals which are always 8.03 and, so, there is always a “Domain Registration Sub Total” that is a multiple of 8.03. The listed domains are always paid by card the previous day and, so, appear in the “Starting Balance”.

Absolutely no other item or service is listed or named on these invoices, but then the “Current charges” subtotal - which, in the case of my account, is usually exactly the same as the domain subtotal - seems to include something else. The “Current charges” subtotal minus the domain subtotal is the mysterious additional unexplained charge in each of these 3 invoices.

Leaving out the individual domains, here are all 3 invoices that I have received since they went nuts at the start of this month:

3rd December, mysterious additional charge of $24.09:

2nd December, mysterious additional charge of $56.21:

1st of December, mysterious additional charge of $8.03:

I created a spreadsheet of all my invoices going back over a year, just to make sure I fully understood how their system is supposed to work. You sometimes get some items being shifted to the next bill but, because everything is paid in realtime (apart from $5 per month Workers plan), it is usually pretty easy to keep track of.

Again, the only items listed in the main body of each invoice are domains, nothing else, no indication is given of what else is being included in the “Current charges”. It is the most unusual and most opaque form of invoicing I have ever come across.

[adaptive]

Might not be Workers billing issue at the end. Let us wait for support reply.

[imappoet]

Thanks, good to hear that from someone more familiar with Workers than I.

At this point, I reckon it almost certainly is some form of repeating error. On past experience, it will take at least a week for Support to take a proper look, so, I should probably remove my payment method from my account to stop getting charged each day.

Thank you very much for all your help @adaptive

[signalnerve]

hey @imappoet, i’m escalating this internally so we can help figure out what happened here. sorry about this, unexpected charges are indeed scary!

[signalnerve]

@imappoet if you haven’t already, please write into our support team! if there’s any sort of documentation improvements that the workers developer experience team can make once you get some resolution there, please let us know!

[imappoet]

Thank you Kristian, I appreciate your understanding that unexpected charges are so unnerving. The immediate impression from CF support of auto-replies and “We are experiencing an unprecedented demand for our Free service which is causing delays for our Free customers” and “Priority is given to Enterprise, Business and Pro customers” do make one worry that relatively small customers will struggle to get problems like this addressed.

I am just a non-Enterprise bum just looking for a better way to do static WordPress

@adaptive’s help reassured me that this is probably (80%) not a Workers issue, but I greatly appreciate your giving it a bump internally. I want to be able to say to people that Workers is a way to not only improve performance globally but, also, cut down on the mental overhead of WordPress hosting. Billing predictably is obviously a big part of that, whether that relates to how Workers is metered or errors that might creap in at a higher level in the CF billing system.

I have, indeed, submitted a Support ticket.

[matteo]

Posting the ticket number usually helps the team find it quicker without doing guess work…

[adaptive]

Now it is my turn. I got a transaction from Cloudflare
Went to: billing > subscriptions and it was a domain renewal.
Haven’t go the invoice yet.

@imappoet have you checked billing > subscriptions?

[imappoet]

@matteo Yes, thanks, I should have thought of that.

The ticket now appears to be #1794848

Incredibly, they decided to merge my original ticket about this problem with an older ticket about a completely unrelated problem.

#1794848 had already been sitting there for a week with no acknowledgement that anyone even understood the problem being presented (a bug preventing the renewal of specific domains, as discussed here in this community forum).

I do not understand the logic of now confusing both problems.

[imappoet]

@adaptive Thanks for the suggestion. I have checked billing > subscriptions. It consists entirely of $8.03 domain subscriptions, listed in date order, with only ONE exception.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the $5 Workers subscription is dated Nov 28th but does not follow the date order, appearing in the list between October and September.

I have combed through all 1,078 subscriptions and that one $5 Workers Unlimited subscription is the ONLY non-domain item.

Of course, it says $5.00/mo + usage, so, this leaves me with 2 possibilities:

Possibility 1: The unlisted, unprecedented charges are billing errors and have nothing to do with my Workers subscription.

In that case Cloudflare should refund me any part of those invoices that was not a domain renewal that can be attached to an actual domain.

It would also be good if Cloudflare took the opportunity to identify and fix the error, so that they won’t be over-billing other customers, most of whom will be too unwary to notice or too busy to do anything about it.

As an unusually heavy user of Cloudflare’s domain registrar service (possibly the biggest individual owner?), I have tripped over a lot of edge cases, uncovering and taking the time to report many registrar-related bugs. Sadly, in my experience, they are rarely ever fixed. You simply have to remain vigilant and double-check everything.

Possibility 2: My meagre usage of Workers (2 small static sites with almost no traffic and no fancy Workers tricks) has somehow racked up almost a hundred dollars in overage fees.

This would be very bad because all indications provided by the Cloudflare dashboard suggest that I have remained well within my plan allowance. At no point did I receive any email or other notification that I had drifted beyond my plan’s quotas.

Also, if this sudden charging of almost a hundred dollars represent overuse fees accumulated over 3 months, it breaks with the standard billing practice for monthly services: you always make usage-based costs clear by collecting on them each and every month, not allowing them to gather, over several months, into a special surprise for your customers.

This would all also mean that Workers Sites is massively more expensive than even the most expensive managed WordPress hosting. Quite apart from the cost, the irregular and unpredictable way in which it is billed means that no individual or business should ever use Workers Sites.

So, I am crossing my fingers that Possibility 1 is true, that it is all just a billing error with no relation to any service I am subscribed to and that Workers remains a viable option for hosting websites.

[matteo]

Looking at all the info it seems to me that possibility 1 is the most likely scenario. Only they will be able to check that. It happened to me once where they overbilled (it was >2000$ instead of my normal 40/50$ month). In the end it was a reporting issue of the data stored in KV (different base unit expected by different steps in the billing pipeline doing 1000x the price). They refunded pretty quickly (1-2 days) and even more than needed (they didn’t keep the correctly owed amount). I am on the business plan though so the initial response was quicker than on the free plan.

[imappoet]

Thanks @matteo

I certainly hope you’re right that possibility 1 is more likely

It might even be the same problem that you encountered. They might have refunded you, after you had argued for it, but not bothered to fix it for other customers.

That customers paying for Workers and domains are considered “free” users and, therefore, not deserving of proper support, is an unfortunate anomoly, especially in cases such as this, where the user is trying to alert Cloudflare to a glitch in their system that probably also affects the customers they do value.

[matteo]

That fix was implemented, I am sure of it. I directly spoke to the PM for KV and they did reach out to other customers who had the same issue. 1000x the cost is a lot, especially if you are actually using it heavily.

As far as support is concerned they do reply to everyone, but priority has to be given, humans are finite.

[imappoet]

Humans are finite, and bugs are infinite

I’m just saying that, sometimes, if something of such core importance as billing is messing up, it is a negative for Cloudflare themselves to pay less attention to possibly useful alerts simply because they come from “free” customers.

Glad to hear that your bug got fixed. I have noticed that the Workers team have a different attitude than the Registrar team, who have been my main experience of Cloudflare. Again, possibly it is because Cloudflare Registrar is seen as a free / loss-leading service.

[thomas4]

From my experience, Cloudflare is one of the few enterprise companies that actually give 2 cents about their customers, even the free ones. IBM being the worst experience I’ve ever had, they don’t give a ■■■■ if the service is down for hours even if it’s “cloud” based (Their distributed CouchDB variant).

[imappoet]

As I’m now learning, not all parts of Cloudflare are the same.

I am still staggered, though, that Laurie, the Senior Technical Engineer for Billing closed a support ticket that was finally on the way to being resolved. I might be perceiving it too emotionally but, from where I’m sitting, that does not feel like a customer-oriented action.