As soon as a credit card is in the relationship exploration and experimentation is over for me.
My local Linux machine may go on fire but it will never send me an invoice no matter what I do.
As an example, if you use Azure with a Visual Studio subscription which includes credit, once the credit is used all of your services are suspended and no further charges are incurred.
As a pay-as-you-go customer this option does not exist. You can set a billing "alert" but that doesn't stop the charges.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
In typical Google fashion it's luck of the draw if you get saved or lose your home [2]
I updated my post to link to the section about capping costs, though that still has the delay and won't totally save you.
What a pointless (and perhaps malicious) feature. If something slow is going on, I can check it manually.
It is when something fast is going on that I need automated emergency stops.
> Note: There is a delay of up to a few days between incurring costs and receiving budget notifications. Due to usage latency from the time that a resource is used to the time that the activity is billed, you might incur additional costs for usage that hasn't arrived at the time that all services are stopped.
So still pretty useless. Apparently they do have real-time billing updates via PubSub, but then it's up to you to code what to do when you spend too much. If you're in an exploring phase for [GCP PRODUCT X] you're not going to preemptively write a safeguard to turn off [GCP PRODUCT X] in case of too high billing updates.
It's better than nothing, but kind of a slap in the face that they do have all the tools to really allow people to have a hard spending limit, but they don't.
I've heard the argument "but it's too dangerous, people might lose non-backed up data", but that also happens if you set a Billing Limit, just that the billing limit will kill all your projects AND still let you rack days of over-the-budget billing.
The true cost of all technology is only apparent when you get the exit fee invoice.