Stay on Firebase Spark forever — never enable Blaze

Firebase capped to Spark. Blaze excluded (no-card rule)

Stay on Firebase Spark forever — never enable Blaze

Decision

The single Firebase project (oriz-app) stays on the Spark plan forever. Blaze is never enabled — not for a feature, not as a “temporary upgrade”, not as an experiment.

Why

Documented 2025–2026 bill-shock incidents (simmer.io ~$98K, Tamara ~$70K, €54K Gemini key) prove the Blaze failure mode is catastrophic. Cloud Spend Caps from Cloud Next ‘26 are private preview AND don’t cover Firestore / Storage / Hosting. The Cyclenerd Terraform killswitch is the only real defense and even it lags hours-to-days behind actual spend. Spark’s failure mode — “service stops at quota” — is the only one with no cost ceiling. This is the highest-stakes specific application of the no-card-on-file rule.

Implications

• Architect for Spark headroom: 50K Firestore reads/day, 20K writes/day, 1 GB storage, 50K MAU.
• Spread load to other layers (GitHub-as-DB, Turso, browser localStorage) so Firestore reads/writes stay well under the cap.
• Defend Spark from bot abuse with App Check + reCAPTCHA Enterprise + Firestore security rules requiring request.app != null.
• If a feature genuinely needs Blaze, the feature is wrong — redesign it onto the rest of the free stack.
• The runbook at knowledge/runbooks/blaze-without-paying.md (planned) exists ONLY as the 30-min “what to do if accidentally enabled” recovery, not as an upgrade path.

Cross-refs

• Never hit free-tier quotas
• No card-on-file rule
• No subscriptions anywhere
• Firebase Spark service entry
• Layer 3 — Firebase Spark architecture

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