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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service instead of continuing to charge me". It seems so easy and obvious, and I'll never ever use a platform for personal projects that doesn't let you have a failsafe

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We'll definitely be looking into usage limits after the fix rolls out.

Glad to hear!

> I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service instead of continuing to charge me".

Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option. It would only help the hobbyist types who aren't doing anything mission-critical and aren't the platform's most profitable (not big spenders, not particularly loyal because they aren't big enough to tailor their infra to that platform, etc.)

I'm not sure that's true. It's probably a lower risk for them, but still, a runaway service can rack up unlimited bills. At some point it matters to everybody. Even if they set it to $CURRENT_CASH_RESERVES, that has non-zero value

And when we talk about the in-between - startups - I'm pretty sure I read at least one anecdote on here about being put out of business by surprise hosting bills

Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option

Unless they prefer to rely on being large and valuable as a leverage, they just have much bigger limits. And even in such autoscale-type company there may be a separate department that would want to limit their budget because they have one. Imagine spending $100k extra accidentally in your office while the whole budget is around $10M and now you can’t simply reach support on terms of “that billion was clearly a mistake”, because $10.1M seems normal.

With self-serve developer tooling like vercel they are hoping that devs bring the tools to work that they have been prototyping themselves. That’s why there’s a free tier.

This is why I use virtual credit cards with preconfigured spending limits for each vendor.

If this happened to me, and Vercel refused to refund it, I would simply cancel the service and dare them to collect the debt.

Too bad more and more services start rejecting them. For example, GCP started rejecting virtual prepaid cards from my banks a while ago.

I was looking at Jarvislabs for renting some GPUs recently. They use a prepay model. Pay up front and things shut down when the credit is used up.

https://jarvislabs.ai/docs/accounts-user/add-credits/

Doesn't AWS offer limits? Smaller companies don't?

From what I remember, they don't offer limits, and neither does GCP. They offer billing alerts and that's it. Both cloud platforms operate on what they call a "shared responsibility" model, aka you bill it you buy it.

And these alerts aren't realtime. Meaning damage is already done when you receive an alert 24h after the fact.

I thought I remembered someone saying AWS doesn't, and I've heard stories from people on here about other platforms

I think Vultr offered a similar feature that was helpful for me. It's definitely good to see more companies looking at adopting this feature.

the big clouds usually have something you can wrap around alerting on their usage tracking APIs, but that's often very "eventually consistent" and might be delayed by days. Which is understandable in some cases, is still useful for some cases, but e.g. doesn't reliably protect you from "oh crap a broken config launched way to many VMs and now I've spent 10k in a day"

It might be really hard to add in retroactively. Otherwise there’s no excuse, it’s such an annoying vulnerability for a customer, even if you can email support and get a refund. Where I work, modal.com, we have enforced budget limits for accounts.

> It might be really hard to add in retroactively

I don't see how?

  if (cap != null && service.currentBill > cap) {
    service.deactivate()
  }

So do you want all your S3 buckets deleted when you reach the cap? How about that pet EC2 with ephemeral storage?

Sure, it gets more complicated with storage. But I think we're mostly talking about stateless services here

And for storage or storage-having services you could easily have a "shut it down but preserve the data for a comparatively-small recurring fixed storage charge"

Because the customers that may use this feature don't make the company any money. The users that do wouldn't want or need this feature.

Usually these billing systems are somewhat async so they’re would probably still be overages

Better than nothing though

it seems they make enough money without us as customers, to me it's weird as well.

there are platforms out there that offer it, but i dont remember their name because its not a feature that leads, its a nice to have.

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