Just a quick word of warning… if you’ve got a Mongo DB serverless database running you better keep an eye on the bill. I’ve just been stung for $155 for 2 1/2 days. To say I’m shocked is an understatement .
The pricing structure is really not user friendly and TBH I feel a bit scammed. Mongo Team - I feel like there should be some kind of warning during the setup about the possibility of this, or maybe force the user to set a price cap per month. Perhaps example pricing would also help…
FYI - I only uploaded about 4.5 million docs (1.5 gb) and did some ‘manual testing’ which involved searching for records and displaying the data on a webpage. I also had a server add new docs every 15 minutes (about 20-100 docs)… not exactly enterprise scale stuff.
Hi Nathan,
I work in the serverless PM team and I am sorry your experience has been less than perfect. As serverless is one of the latest offering from MongDB, we are always looking to improve the product. I will be reaching out to you to discuss your issues in more details.
So I setup a serverless Mongo DB database to test a small project I’m working on… it’s ended up costing me $190 for 3 days. Luckily I spotted the bill - God only knows what it could have been by the end of the month!
So what did I do wrong?
Simple - I chose ‘serverless instance’ instead of a fixed monthly contract. The serverless sounds cheap - just pay for what you use… however the pricing structure isn’t very user friendly and you can be caught out BIG TIME! How big? Well my database of 4.5million simple documents, with me as the only user, cost me ~$190 for 3 days!
Please don’t be like me.
Mongo team, you really need to work on the docs for that product. Give some examples of how the pricing works in ‘real life scenarios’. Searching online shows I’m not the first to be hit by this… I hope I’m the last!
On the plus side the M5 server I’ve now got is very good… and not any slower! It will also take at least 6 months to run up the same bill… not 3 days!!
Hi friends!
Big warning! Mongodb serverless is a real scam. I was charged $312 for a 7 days for nothing. More than $40 per day!! We just uploaded a database of small online community application. 1.5 gbyte. Less than 200 active users a day. Their pricing claims that cost of read is $0.1 per million reads. This means my 200 users made 400million reads a day!!
I tried to reach them through a support chat but every response from them takes hours. I requested some details. NO ANSWER.
Bottom line I was a big fun of mongodb and deployed a dozen of projects. I recommend my customers mongodb whenever it may fit requirements. It is very convenient database especially for startups,but they caught us this time
They always were more expensive then others, but this time they bet my imagination. I’m really disappointed and angry. I hope my lesson will be helpful for others. So I’m still waiting for a details. Will share with you in my blog.
Cheers!
We have a very simlar problem. For a day when nobody used our platform, mongo says they received 0.1M read, which is impossible. With a database of 95MB and 200 users using our platfor for 2 hours, they say we did more than 200M read. I think they are wrong computing the reads (or this is a scam)
Thank you all for reporting this. I was just about to subscribe to serverless and feared that I was unable to calculate the cost for our application. A friend of mine warned me about their pricing and surprises that may come up. You confirmed this. I’ll stay miles away from Serverless for the moment.
My bill went from $20/month to over $1000 . I looked at the billing usage and it started to spike on the 04/08/23 to 500 million RPU (weird its a round number). keep in mind there were no development changes and no change in traffic. Support said they will get back to me. Had to shut down the project in the mean time until this gets figured out. Hopefully support will get back to me soon.
I am from the Atlas Serverless team and am very sorry for the experience you’ve had. Please see the “Serverless Pricing” section of this post for more information on how the bill is calculated along with this article on helpful tips to optimize workloads on your Serverless instance.
We apologize for the experience you have had. Please let us know if you have any additional questions by Direct Messaging me or by contacting support by clicking on the icon on the bottom right of this page.
I am seeing the same issue here, it’s been running for 5 days now and already $20? How do I see the reads? I am sure I barely have any reads, I use the DB once a day, around 7k records.
If you go to the “View Monitoring” tab, you should be able to see a chart for “Read/Write Units”. I would also recommend you take a look at the article and post linked in my previous post to get a better understanding of how pricing for serverless works. Please feel free to direct message me if you have other questions.
I created a serverless instance to test for my app! I was in the free tier and moved to serverless assuming my costs would be better matched for that case as I have spiking load. To my shock, I am seeing a 20 dollar daily bill, with RPUs spiking into millions for no obvious reasons. There seems to be some issues with the pricing here. This basically makes serverless not cost effective at all and should I just go to dedicated instance?
Please see the “Serverless Pricing” section of this post for more information on how the bill is calculated along with this article on helpful tips to optimize workloads on your Serverless instance.
I want to point out that there is a bug if you are using MongoDB Compass that can lead to indexes not being used.
If you create an index in MongoDB Compass, it won’t be used by the Node.js driver (and possibly others, though I can’t speak to that personally).
MongoDB Compass will be able to use the index just fine, making you think it’s working, when it’s not. People should be aware this is a possible cause of their bill being high.
I had the same issue, $122 in 2 days. I had a few megabytes of data on my instance, I won’t ever use this product again. The app was not live, it had 0 users. Just me playing around with my API
I am from the Serverless team and am terribly sorry about the experience you’ve had. Based on your screenshot, it seems like there were a lot of unindexed queries being run. I have sent you a direct message to better understand your use case. I would also suggest checking out the links posted in my responses above. Looking forward to corresponding over direct message.
It’s worth mentioning again, after reading the docs my bill is significantly lower, although this is just a learning app for me, so no real customers/data.
Also got hit for $180 in 7 days. We have 0 users besides 2 developers testing our website. We do have a socket API writing to database constantly but the bandwidth for that is minimal. Pretty ridiculous. Definitely feels like a scam.
