Both are indeed correct: you must now provide a credit card to use Cloud Functions, and you do get a free tier on the Blaze plan.
In fact, the Blaze plan comes with a free tier that is bigger than the limit of the free plan was, but you can no longer use it without entering a credit card.
This change came while adding support for newer node.js versions. Cloud Functions now uses Cloud Build to create its containers, and while Cloud Build does offer a free tier, you'll have to enter a credit card to use it.
firebaser here Completely agreed that we should do a better job in documenting the security rules. They're very powerful, but a huge paradigm shift for most developers, one that is too easily ignored (at your own and your user's peril). We've already released a bunch of improvements on the documentation, and continue to work on adding new documentation, video tutorials, and console improvements. Please keep telling us where we can/should improve security rules further though.
And yes, also agreed on needing a solution for presence system, either in Firestore itself, or separate from it.
Hey there. Thanks for letting us know. We unfortunately don't have a fix for this at the moment. We've seen reports on network connections not being reestablished, but have been unable to reproduce it so far. If you've filed a bug report, the best way to help us reproduce it is by adding details to the report. That then also gives our team a way to get back in touch with you once they're able to reproduce (and then fix) the problem. Thanks again for the report!
source: I'm the MC for the event. :-)