I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.
As you say they make it hard deliberately.
Edit: Turn out Azure have this:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...
Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...
My own instances go down all the time when I forget to ‘top up’ the account
It's very easy to overspend on these big cloud providers
Oh I can't edit the comment now oh well sorry if I've confused anyone.
CMIIW, it'll be my first cloud provider if I can set one.
Contract dispute cases might clarify it, but probably not in the direction any of us is hoping.
"Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.
I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.
"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?"
"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co engaging in predatory death-trap pricing schemes to defraud consumers?"
What is being asked in one of those questions is clear to everybody. The other is jargon and excludes the majority of the population from understanding the intended meaning. And note, you don't have to agree that it is "predatory death-trap pricing" at all. That is simply in the above sentence an accusation. Words have meanings. That the accusation be understood clearly by as many people as possible is important.
However regarding your other claims- I dont work on websites, I know the term "dark pattern". so your assertion that "nobody else knows what it is" is false. You might then argue that I'm still in tech, but that's just another goalpost that I can reach anyway: if you google for the term you'll find vox articles, explainer sites, even newyorktimes articles using this term.
So yes, it's a common place term and your assertion to the contrary does not hold any water.
Or craft clothing for goths?
But the "dark" comes from its association with evil: "Defense against the Dark Arts", "The Dark Lord", "Turn to the Dark Side of the Force". It's a clear implication that the people are "selling their souls to the devil": knowingly doing something "a little bit evil" to achieve their aims.
(edit) looks like that's not the case, I'm sure I used to have to buy a second instance a few years ago if I did want to use more bandwidth that was allocated
For those curious, the overage rate is $10/TB ($0.01/GB) after the transfer included in the plan.
The smallest amount of included transfer is 1TB for the $5/mo VPS.
If you use up your monthly network transfer pool, you can continue to use your Linodes normally. That being said, you will be charged $0.01 for each additional GB at the end of your billing cycle.
But the water company does not actually allow you to install proper taps to regulate the water so you use duct tape to do so, and due to an earthquake something falls on the tap causing your duct tape solution to fail leading to a massive surge of water, leading to your massive water bill.
Did the water company cause this? No. Your duct tape solution wasn’t resilient enough because it didn’t factor in an earthquake. But I would be justifiably mad that my water company does not allow me to install actual taps, and allows unforeseen and unpredictable situations to make me run up huge bills that could otherwise have been avoided with a proper tap.
Funny enough...Oracle (OCI) makes it better, you can buy oracle"coins" 1to1 with $ and load your account just with what you think you need.
Hard requirement: My image can run on it (freebsd and linux), no proprietary BS, no special stuff, give me vm-"harware" make it fast, make it cheap, make it reliable, that's it..that's it.
And ATM i like oracle hetzner and vultr at most. If one of those change to my disgust i change, no big deal...just some dns rewrite.
This is how mobile and landline phone companies made enormous fortunes before flat rate billing. It’s called post-paid vs pre-paid billing.