I make free apps for people in my spare time. I recently made a small tool that helps you name a brand.

In order to make this I needed to pre-populate our database with > 500 million domain names, so searching would be instantaneous for the user. I set up a 16 core VM and wrote a concurrent parser in go optimized for speed to make sure we had a populated database for launch.

I started the parser and went to bed, and woke up to 17 missed calls from my the guy I made this with saying we had racked up a 3k bill. Turns out the parser managed to hit 14k reads and 14k writes per second and kept that up for 9 straight hours, and because we had optimized for speed, not to minimize reads and writes, we ended doing 10 billion reads and 10 billion writes over night. We thought the project was going to end here because we could barely even pay this bill with millions of entries still left to be populated (we’re students).

I immediately tweeted at google explaining the situation not really expecting anything to happen(The fuck up was really on 100% on us, we deserved to pay the whole bill). They were super understanding about the situation and gave us a small reimbursement and technical advice.

Still have over 1k left to pay, so I suppose the money would go towards that :P