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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

The entirety of the docs talk about how easy it is to set up a job, run job, have a recurring job and then pricing is in compute Gb hours. I've literally no idea how those two things relate to each other in real world use. Its a bit of a cognitive disconnect that I'm sure makes a lot of sense having built it but not to me as a possibly interested developer.

Some examples of how many job iterations would use 1 Gb hour would help, or maybe I'm missing them?

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This is great feedback, and initially I had a calculator for this. We removed it because we felt it would be intuitive but you're right we built it and it's easy to lose that outside perspective.

It's really just the running time of your program (you control this) plus a less than a second of setup / tear down time. If your job is set to consume 1GB that's it, you've consumed that many GB-seconds. If it's a 128MB job, then you've only consumed 1/8th of that many GB-seconds.

Let me know if this example is getting it across, it's a simplified version of the pricing of other serverless platforms.

Any plans to have pre-paid credits?

Hey, we could do this but I'm curious why you would prefer this? More solid payment expectations?

Perhaps. One of the things I sort of like about Twilio is that they can do "credits" and I have the option to only pay for a certain amount.

For me to evaluate something, the amount I'll be billed must have an upper bound that I control. So yes, more solid payment expectations.

Same ^

I really need to guarantee controlling unbounded costs. I would think most people have similar expectations.

Because I'd hate for a bug in my code to result in an accidental infinite loop at 2 AM and then wake up to a $1,000 bill. I'd rather pre-pay and have my task get killed if I run out of credit.

In Germany almost no one owns a normal credit card.

How do you usually purchase things online?

Direct debit, invoice + debit transfer, PayPal are all fairly common options in Germany (+ a bunch of smaller services, + the option of handing the payment to the delivery person, but that's fairly expensive, so I assume it's not used all that often despite being often available)

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