They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize.
For one person that will complain wildly and having to do a gesture, there are hundreds other companies that will not notice or just pay without recourse.
This is a naive understanding of how corporations like Google and Amazon work. Bad will and using gym membership tactics aren't how they scale or make money. Getting you to confidently try things knowing you won't get charged (the reason they have those free tiers) so you'll get your company, your start-up, your next side project on it is much better for business.
It's a miss that things like this aren't implemented and widespread, not by design.
> It's not complicated to add configurable hard limits for these companies but they don't allow it because the current situation is more interesting for them.
I'm not in this space, but from my observations:
- Each service has a different billing model and metering model. Most likely this data is held by the service. I'm familiar with AWS so I'll use them as an example. I'd wager only DynamoDB or only Lambda (the service owners) know how much of those services you've consumed
- Billing is most likely reconciled asynchronously after collecting all data from all services by an entirely different department with knowledge of payments and accounting
- GCP, AWS, Azure launch 50+ services a year
- Each large customer most likely has a special rate. I bet Samsung or Snap pay an entirely different set of rates than the normal customer. There are thousands of these exceptions
- Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions. Your long running instance hosting your critical service is shut off because of experimenting on a new ML workflow?
Even with only the above I can see the difficulty in globally limiting your spending limit at an accurate level. I know there are features for both AWS and GCP and they try.
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and handwave away technical complexity at scale, but I'd encourage you to give all of these providers a more charitable view, at least on this topic.
Except they do that with their actions.
>Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions.
Sure! But if they cared about customers as you claim, they'd let users set hard limits, and when one of these mishaps happened, stop the services when their system eventually knows that the quota has been exceeded... and, make the user only pay the hard limit as the maximum amount. If this continues to happen, warn the user that their account will be terminated... and that's that. But they'll never do that.
Most of their clients pay for these mistakes because they don't have the reach or skills to make this a viral social media article to get people's attention and hence get them to forgive the costs.
I'm sure they know how much they make in revenue because of these mistakes and they deliberately don't do anything about it.
What is your educated guess by when this feature would be essentially correctly implemented in AWS and GCP (essentially = negligible costs to the providers due to either false negatives (bills they eat) and false positives (PR fallout, when SomeSite gets shutdown despite not being over limit)?
I think that's true. It's easier to measure usage and aggregate that data after the fact than to meter it in real time and stop at a limit. Those are very different things. What happens if you hit the cap while running multiple processes spread across a cloud?
One improvement might be to throttle things as the cap approaches but that doesnt really change the problem at all. Do that and have provider eat any overages should solve it from the user point of view.
I have very little money so I just don't use their services because a mistake would be disastrous. They might be losing out on me making a unicorn app on their platform. It's unlikely, but while the possibility of catastrophe exists I'll stick to not using them. That extends to not recommending anyone uses them either in case the worst happens.
Then the harsh reality is: companies don't care. Yeah, your app might turn out to be a unicorn, but the overwhelming odds are that it won't. And no one cares that you'll tell your other broke friends to avoid the service.
We'd all like to think it to be different, that a company might care about appeasing my broke ass. But as already pointed out, they want the whales. I also wonder, despite the number of years "cloud services" have been around, if companies aren't still trying to figure out a gazillion other things and limiting customer spend might be a bit low on the priority list.
I do my best to avoid FAANG giants who don't think about me.