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(a legal angle might be the Unfair Contract Terms Directive in the EU, though plenty of individual countries have their own laws that may apply to my understanding. A quite equivalent situation were the "bill shock" situations for mobile phone users, where people went on vacation and arrived home to an outrageously high roaming bill that they didn't understand they incurred. This is also limited today in the EU; by law, the service must be stopped after a certain charge is incurred)
On that note, I'll just mention that I had discovered over the last while that when you prepay $10 into your Anthropic account, either directly, or via the newer "Extra usage" in subscription plans, and then use Claude Code, they will repeatedly overbill you, putting you into a negative balance. I actually complained and they told me that they allow the "final query" to complete rather than cutting it off mid-process, which is of course silly, because Claude Code is typically used for long sessions, where the benefit of being cut off 52% into the task rather than 51% into it is essentially meaningless.
I ended up paying for these so far, but would hope that someone with more free time sues them on it.
This means that billing happens asynchronously. You may use queues, you may do batching, etc. But you won't have a realtime view of the costs
Well, that makes sense in principle, but they obviously do have some billing check that prevents me from making additional requests after that "final query". And they definitely have some check to prevent me from overutilizing my quota when I have an active monthly subscription. So whatever it is that they need to do, when I prepay $x, I'm not ok with them charging me more than that (or I would have prepaid more). It's up to them to figure this out and/or absorb the costs.
No they don't actually! They try to get close, but it's not guaranteed (for example, make that "final query" to two different regions concurrently).
Now, they could stand up a separate system with a guaranteed fixed cost, but few people want that and the cost would be higher, so it wouldn't make the money back.
You can do it on your end though: run every request sequentially through a service and track your own usage, stopping when reaching your limit.
I still had to pay it or else I wouldn't have been able to use my account.
Would that have been so bad? The world might be a better place if people stopping pouring money into that cesspit.
By continue to use their services, you're encouraging the anti-consumer tactics you're complaining about.
In fact, OpenAI's "billing", "usage tracking" and "billing/spending alerts" UX all have terrible UX. They look like completely independent features.
For example, you can set alert on how much you've spent in a month, but not on how much you have left in your credit bank. So you never really know how much you can still spend unless you go check their slow and confusing UI. You can set it to auto-refill your credits and to limit that to some amount per month (I think?), but again the alerts for this are absolutely atrocious or entirely missing.
Another insane thing I've seen with OpenAI is that, for some reason, your account can be thousands in the red, and some prompts, with some models, or some feature set, still go through. I haven't been able to figure out what heuristic or rule they are using to determine when they let your request through and overbill you, or when they just deny it altogether. Maybe they let all text requests through? Or perhaps it just lets websearch requests through and denies anything else? Maybe it profiles your your most common request and lets those go through? Maybe it had something to do with specific endpoints and APIs? Who knows.
We've moved entire projects off of them in part due to these issues. We got tired of constantly being in the red without a proper notification system (actually: with an insufficient, deceitful system), or of having seemingly random drops in requests only to find out suddenly that combination of parameters got blocked. Please, just completely block me and make me pay. Or give me a better alerts system. We have the money. What we haven't got is the patience to deal with such an obtuse system
If you have a cap and then your thing hits the front page and suddenly has 10000% more legitimate traffic than usual, and you want the legitimate traffic, they're going to get an error page instead of what you want. If there is no cap, you're going to get a large bill. People hate both of those things and will complain regardless of which one actually happens.
The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.
Google will probably have me go through five bots and if, by some kind of miracle, I manage to have a human on the phone, they will probably explain to me that I should have read the third paragraph of the fourth page of the self service doc and it's obviously my fault.
Super, super painful. That being said, I'm still using Google for geocoding (mostly batch) because their service works better for my data.
This is one of the reasons people have suggested using a different provider for backups.
Upstream in the comments someone said they expect the EU might soon rule this type of billing illegal. That doesn't mean it becomes illegal, it just means yet another reaffirmation or reminder that - yes - this is indeed illegal.
You said that no fixed response -whether that is allow unexpected billing to increase without limit upon a surge vs serving error pages- will be accepted by the clientele, because some want it one way and others want it the other way.
Why would you force a single shoe size onto a population? Give them the choice. Whenever freedom of choice is violated in the name of market freedom, it is nearly always a violation of law, it's just a matter of hoping one lives in a jurisdiction that upholds its laws
> The issue here is, if you unintentionally try to make a billion expensive requests or allow someone else to do it against your account, do you want them to automatically turn off your stuff or do you want the bill that comes if they don't?
That is precisely the choice people are asking for! And it doesn't have to be just those 2 options: let the user define their own trigger formulas for different levels of increase: a small one might result in a notification delayed until certain working hours on weekdays and log each visitors reported origin (referer header), a slightly larger one might result in a notification during awake hours regardless of weekday or workday, yet a further larger consumption increase may trigger an unconditional notification, yet a further one might trigger an unconditional notification that requires a timely confirmation by the user/organization, in the absence of which a soft measure could be taken like adding a small header to the page being served notifying visitors that while still functional a hug of death may be in progress, and asking the visitors to paste the URL of the page from where they clicked the link to your site (to make sure that a full URL can be consulted in case the host operators are unable to find the hyperlink that led to their site from merely the origin domain), yet another increase in traffic may be chosen to result in specifically rate limiting users from the originator domains that caused the peak, so that your regular visitors from the past can still make normal use of the page, and so on.
Do freedom, choice, informed choice, preparedness mean something to you?
We could have an open standard configuration textual machine readable file format for these choices and settings, so that people can share their settings, and the machine readable format could have <private> tags to wrap around phone numbers etc to notify, so that people can easily run a command line program or script that censors those exact values and replaces the first phone number like "<private><phone>(+32)474123456</phone></private>" with "<private><phone>generic phone number 1</phone></private>" and the second email address in the file like "<private><email>john.smith@nonprofit.org</email></private>" is replaced with "<private><email>generic.email@address.2</email></private>", so that people can easily export and share such files, possibly hosting it like robots.txt but say billing_policy.txt so people can inspect how others handle these situations so that popular consensus policies can form.
Hosting, compute etc. services that allow users to configure such files and have them be executed by the hosting service will be more attractive than those which don't.
No, it's because people dislike both of those things and don't want either one of them, and frequently fail to realize ahead of time that choosing between them is even necessary and then get upset by whichever one actually happens.
> Why would you force a single shoe size onto a population?
Here's my original post:
> The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.
> And it doesn't have to be just those 2 options
We're talking about an API used by programmers. You don't need them to give you any of that, all you need is for the API to tell you what your current usage is -- and even that is only necessary if something other than your own code is racking up usage. When you're the one making queries and the price of each one is known ahead of time or available via the API, you can already implement any of that logic yourself.
But have you considered it from the companies POV? Charging whatever you like and its always the customers fault is a pretty sweet deal. Up next in the innovation pipeline is charging customers extra fees for something or other. It'll be great!
But not in the causal sense of the word but in the legal "the company didn't folly the legal required base line of acting with due diligence".
In general companies are required to act with diligence, this is also e.g. where punitive damages come in to produce a insensitive to companies to act with diligence or they might need to pay far above the actual damages done.
This is also why in some countries for negligence the executives related to the negligent decisions up to the CEO can be hold _personally_ liable. (Through mostly wrt. cases of negligence where people got physically harmed/died; And mostly as an alternative approach to keeping companies diligent, i.e. instead of punitive damages.).
The main problem is that in many cases companies do wriggle their way out of it with a mixture of "make pretend" diligence, lawyer nonsense dragging thing out and early settlements.
Not illegal, but it should make enforcing payment illegal.
laughs in European
Your attorney can push for whatever illegal thing they can think of, it doesn't mean you will get it.
It is not illegal to include legal fees in damages.
Legal fees are literally not damages. A court granting legal fees would be doing that in addition to damages.
In most cases the jury will never even be told what your attorneys fees are, and they are not permitted to award them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
The default "American rule" is that each party pays their own legal fees, unless there is a relevant fee shifting rule.
You can request anything you want? Granting it would be illegal.
An attorney asking the judge to break the law and award attorney fees is literally asking for something illegal in most circumstances. There are exceptions. (By illegal I mean contrary to law.)
It's funny that 4 people downvoted me instead of bothering to check Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
If you put in "surely" and people think it's quite wrong then they might downvote. It's not personal.