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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

> If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances?

Why not simply take the service offline once it reaches the free tier limit??

The reason why is that AWS is greedy, and would rather force you to become a paid customer…

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How do you take your S3 service offline when they charge for storage or your EBS volumes? Your databases?

Block access to the service until the next billing period starts, or the user upgrades to a paid tier.

And it is still incurring charges for storage costs.

At Amazon scale, including a "we don't delete the data for 30 days if a bill isn't paid" clause is a plausible thing to include in the "free" tier. Paid tiers owe Amazon the contracted rate for the storage, as with any similar contract, and when Amazon deletes the data if payment isn't rendered when due is up to the terms of the contract.

There is no such thing as the “free tier” at least until July of this year. Some services are free for the first year up to a certain limit, some give you a bucket of free usage every month, etc.

Then you owe the contracted rate for the storage. These massive bills are almost never for storage, they're almost always for some sort of compute or transport left unrestricted. If you store 500TB you'll get an $11k/month bill, but the vast majority of the services can simply cut off usage at a limit. Even storage could prevent adding new data if you hit a pre-specified limit, so you'd only pay for the data you already had.

If I know my service should never use more than 1TB total I'd like to be able to set a limit at (say) 2TB total with warnings at 0.6TB & 1TB, thus limiting spend to $46/month on storage. Sure, my service will fail if I hit the limit, but if it's using double the storage I expect it to use something went wrong & I want to require manual action to resolve it instead of allowing it to leak storage unbounded.

This is not a particularly difficult problem to make significant improvements on. There are some edge cases (there always are) but even if spending limits were only implemented for non-storage services it'd still be better for customers than the status quo.

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