Firebase and cartesian public reads

Question

I'm working on a product that displays the results of running races. Races could have thousands of participants. So, in the days after a medium-sized event, there might be 3000 non-authenticated users wanting to browse 3000 results.

Although not every visitor will view all the results, the maximum damage at 3000 * 3000 would be 9,000,000 reads which at $.06 (Google cloud pricing) would cost $540,000 (Update: I'm a dummy, I missed the "per 100,000 documents" part, so this would only be $540).

Obviously, I wouldn't deliver all 3000 results for each visit - there would be paging and limits. Though, there's something inherently scary about the possibility of those costs.

Questions:

• Is firebase simply the wrong technology for this type of product?
• Is firebase not really intended for non-authenticated apps? Obviously DDOS becomes a concern for public access and there's no real protection in FB for this.

Every post I've read on these topics assumes developers are building apps for authenticated users.

Answer 1

9,000,000 reads which at $.06 (Google cloud pricing) would cost $540,000

The Firestore pricing of $0.06 is for 100,000 document reads, so 9 million document reads cost $540.

Aside from that: you should model your data in a way that ensures you read the data that the user actually sees. For example, if all users will read the entirety of all 3,000 documents, consider using a data bundle to distribute that to them.

Realistically though it is more likely that each user will read just a subset of the documents, and probably not of all 3,000 documents. So consider if you can combine the part that they'll read into a more cost-efficient structure. For if these were news articles: you could store the headline and intro paragraph of the first 100 articles in a single document, and just read that document (let's call it the frontpage ) into each client when it starts.

There are many more ways to model the data, depending on the use-cases of your app. To learn more on how to think about such data modeling, I recommend reading NoSQL data modeling and watching the excellent Get to know Cloud Firestore video series.