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Comment by WrtCdEvrydy | Hacker News Reader

That's not a bug... that's a 'feature'.

Interestingly, AWS will not cut you off for non-payment (we had an issue with finance and were 250k in the red by the time we got the first 'Is there any issues over there?' email)

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This sounds like a short term 'thinking'. If there are a few stories on the internet (and there are some in this very thread) about developers getting burned by this 'feature', it would turn off a lot of potential users in the future. It would make sense to be transparent and give tools to strictly control usage/billing - both in terms of trust and money.

It is. I'm using free there to build and host my projects. If/when I exceed the free tier I'm not making a billing account unless I can set a max bill. I'll sooner rewrite everything to run on bare metal that has a fixed monthly cost.

I pay my $5 for linode (expanded swap to 2GB, it's SSD backed) and just run Caprover... I'd rather not deal with AWS's billing (even their billing dashboards are delayed by 24 hours)

I've been using gc/firebase. It's very easy to use, with acceptable documentation. I've been able to get dangerous quickly without even trying to. If I weren't on the free tier I would've racked up unaffordable bills. Instead I exhausted my API limits and had to wait. Perfectly acceptable behavior for development. I'll also add some logic to the finished project to handle resource exhaustion. Should I start exhausting resources,and it's not a bug, I'm not going to continue with infinitely scalable/infinitely billable gc. I guess if target customers are companies with 9-12 figure budgets getting a 9 figure bill wouldn't be the end of the World. If I got a high 4 figure bill I'd have to declare bankruptcy.

If you have a payment agreement, GCP won't cut you off provide your account is in good behavior in the past.

If your only payment method is credit card, IMHO allowing a past due account to continue generating cost is a very risky move and an easy target of abusing (imaging stolen credit card etc).

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud as SRE and have first hand experience dealing with past due account (it was highly manual and not automated).

And even as an employee, if you tell them over and over again that customers keep asking for that feature, they disagree with you over and over again.

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