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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Playing ”devil’s” advocate: tracking spend in real-time is not trivial. It adds complexity to stack. Bugs in the feature can cause sites to go down (for long time) without a reason. Larger online businesses likely rather sort out the problems later than risk shutting down in the middle of unexpected success.

(But I also would like to see this feature)

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Vercel will happily tell you how much you are spending in pretty much realtime as it sails past your budget

OP is right though, realtime alerting is non-trivial to build. It looks us a lot of work at Vercel to get right. We also offer budgeting options where you can set spend limits now, too.

Oh wow sorry didn't mean to be personally flippant to the VP! Hacker news is wild.

I just had a look at the billing screen and I can see notifications but not budgeting options (on the Pro plan). Ideally I'd like to monitor/configure spend per deployment as some of our sites have big sales which can = big fees. Is this possible?

Not really. AWS has budget alerts right? And I can read those budget alerts through their API.

So it would be trivial for me to poll their budget API for an alert, and immediatly trigger a shutdown of my Cloudfront service. Why can't they do that for me?

"AWS Budgets information is updated up to three times a day. Updates typically occur 8–12 hours after the previous update" [1]

Something based on this could be definitely better than nothing, but might also give false impression of safety.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

It's something. I started looking into the budget alert docs and it does use SNS so it should be easy to have something polling that queue and respond in any way necessary.

I'm imagining an alert to the on-call team, and a soft shutdown until the on-call team can figure out the next step.

If it can save a few thousand dollars, it's worth it. Each business must make their own estimate of course.

> AWS has budget alerts right?

Nope. Not in real time, they don't.

You can significantly overspend before the warning comes in.

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