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Comment by mirker | Hacker News Reader

I agree you can get something working. However, if 1% of the time, a customer is overcharged $100+ because they assumed the limit was guaranteed, you’d probably reconsider if you want to offer that service at all.

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If 1% of the time a customer uses $100 extra, you don't charge that customer $100 extra. You charge them $0 extra because they had a bill cap and it was your job to enforce that cap. Then you raise the price of the service a very small amount so customers pay $1 more on average and that covers everyone's overages (that's what I mean by amortizing across your customer base). Then you go and improve your limit enforcement because you are actually incentivized to do so, unlike in the case where customers are charged for overages that aren't their fault, where you are actually incentivized to cause overages. Customers aren't dumb, they can see your incentives (see the comment by 0cf8612b2e1e in the adjacent thread).

It’s plausible to do what you’re saying. I still think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you somehow managed to engineer everything perfectly and tune it as you say, you’d still have customers who wanted their service to stay online past overcharge. I’d think the predominant business case for such tight guarantees would be small and low budget projects. Additionally, every cloud vendor who doesn’t do this seems to be cheaper, so you’d be priced out (in a commodity market).

> you’d still have customers who wanted their service to stay online past overcharge

Then they wouldn't configure overcharge limit, would they?

I mean, why not? I have alerts on cost in my cloud usage corresponding to orders of magnitude increases in expected cost. If they trigger a few hours faster (more accurately) that’s good. But I don’t see what I would do bar shutting down the service, so my argument is that it’s not really a feature that would make a difference for most use cases. And if your service is steady, you can already do a linear extrapolation from yesterday’s costs to see if you’d go over budget.

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