From $70,000 invoices to surprise bandwidth charges in the hundreds of thousands, ServerlessHorrors.com is exposing the terrifying side of cloud computing—one horror story at a time.
The serverless era promised ease, scalability, and pay-as-you-go simplicity. Platforms like Vercel, Netlify, AWS, and Firebase have enabled developers to deploy production-ready apps with minimal configuration. But beneath the surface of that convenience lies a growing number of devastating billing disasters—and one small site is documenting them all.
ServerlessHorrors.com is a community-driven blog curated by András, creator of Coolify, an open-source, self-hostable alternative to Heroku, Netlify, and Vercel. The site catalogs true stories of developers, startups, and hobbyists who woke up to five- or six-figure bills after seemingly benign deployments.
Let’s just say: these are stories you never want to live yourself.
🩸 Serverless Gone Wrong: A Few Chilling Examples
| Date | Provider | Amount Billed | Cause / Trigger | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 10, 2025 | Vercel | $738,420 | Spending cap failed, bandwidth overuse | vercel, bandwidth, billing |
| Jan 17, 2025 | Firebase | $70,000.69 | Unexpected storage charges | firebase, GCS, overbilling |
| Jan 13, 2025 | BigQuery | $22,639.69 | Playground use of public dataset | bigquery, sql, usage trap |
| May 26, 2024 | Cloudflare | $120,000.42 | 24h deadline to pay for network traffic | cloudflare, bandwidth, lockout |
| Mar 10, 2024 | Mailgun | $11,000.69 | DoS-triggered email spam, lost DB | mailgun, DDoS, email costs |
| Feb 27, 2024 | Netlify | $104,500.12 | Bandwidth spike from attack | netlify, bandwidth, DDoS |
| Sep 1, 2024 | Mintlify | $383.69 | AI-generated documentation site | AI, docs, unexpected charge |
| Jan 5, 2025 | PostHog | $530.19 | Event tracking misfire | analytics, PostHog, volume spike |
“I thought I set a spending limit. I even double-checked. Then I woke up to a $700K invoice.” — Anonymous on ServerlessHorrors
☁️ What Went Wrong?
These stories follow a pattern: low expectations, big surprises. Users typically assume their “free tier” or minimal monthly plan protects them. But when automation, scale, or security fails, serverless platforms can quietly become financial landmines.
Key triggers across the stories:
- Spending limits don’t always work – and aren’t enforced hard.
- Bandwidth is billed heavily, and often not transparently.
- Background jobs, bots, or DDoS attacks can push traffic far beyond expectations.
- Complex pricing structures make it hard to anticipate actual usage costs.
- AI tools or recursive code can rapidly generate runaway compute or storage.
🚩 What Developers Should Learn
While the serverless model is powerful, abdicating full control of infrastructure can be risky—especially when billing systems prioritize scale over safety.
Some key takeaways from the Serverless Horrors community:
- Always monitor real-time usage metrics, not just monthly summaries.
- Use multi-layer rate-limiting to prevent spikes from bots or attacks.
- Deploy alert systems for usage thresholds, ideally with real-time triggers.
- Test at scale before going live — including edge cases like loops and automated queries.
- Understand egress costs, especially if your users stream images, video, or documents.
🛠️ A Call for Open Alternatives
ServerlessHorrors is more than a warning—it’s a call for better design, transparency, and developer-first tools. Its creator, András, developed Coolify as a direct response: a self-hosted, open-source serverless platform where developers can deploy applications with real limits, observability, and control.
For developers and startups building at the edge of innovation, Coolify offers a middle ground between freedom and safety.
👻 Final Word
Serverless was supposed to free us from DevOps nightmares. But as ServerlessHorrors shows, it’s created a new class of billing horrors hiding behind APIs and dashboards.
If you deploy to Vercel, Firebase, AWS, or Netlify, ServerlessHorrors.com should be required reading.
Because while “it just works” is great… it’s not so great when the next bill reads six figures.
🔗 Website: https://serverlesshorrors.com
✍️ Contribute your story or PR: GitHub Repository
