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Comment by user34283 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to limit spending on Google Cloud?

As far as I saw you can only set up billing alerts, no hard limit.

One caveat to alerts (and automatically acting on alerts) is that there are delays[0] between costs being incurred and alerted. I can't find a Google source for what the delay is, but a source online say it could be "24 hours [to] a few days."[1]

This has been a major reason why I reach for OpenAI models before Gemini, but also why I'd rather use services like RunPod for training jobs. For a small boostrapped company like mine, it feels terrifyingly easy to rack up a company-ending AI bill.

The cloud companies try to limit these accidents through cranking your quotas down to nothing, but this also means that my small company can't just whip up 8xH100 easily without major ceremony, and I have routinely been rejected the GPUs quotas I needed for projects.

Accidentally leaving that kind of node on for the 24 hours that it might take to get an alert would rack up a $2,000+ bill, compared to $500 on RunPod, which will also stop the instance when you run out of money.

I've loved working with major cloud providers at growing VC-funded startups that have credits, TAMs and bigger budgets for errors. But hyperscalers are fairly difficult for a pre-scale bootstrapped business, and arguably not designed or optimized for it.

[0] https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/disable-bi... [1] https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us/articles/360057589931-How...

There is a way to trigger a script when a budget is hit, but they don't make it easy. You set up a billing notification that triggers a script, which can disable resources (like APIs) automatically.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/control-us...

Google Cloud is easy to set up soft budget alerts via email though, something that I had to use third party service for with AWS.

Those budget alerts usually aren't instant though, they only fire when the cloud gets around to reconciling your usage some number of hours or even days after the damage is done. It's better than nothing but with runaway spending you can still blow way past your limit.

There is not any practical way to do this effectively.

There are several, rather tedious and incomplete, hacks that you can apply to attempt to prevent billable actions after limits are hit.

But to be frank - they're cop-outs for a real spending cap.

You'd hope these companies would address this themselves - but it's not profitable for them to resolve (it's somewhat involved and requires them to allow people to pay them less)... So my strong vote is to make the contracts that allow this sort of "un-cappable" spending for automated actions void in court.

Would be very disappointing if that's true, but I've not known Google not to find ways to disappoint.

It's true, neither AWS nor GCP support spending limits. Only alerting.

That's because you pay for stuff like storage. If you had a spending limit, they'd have to delete your data to stop your spend.

If only there was a way to pause all the other stuff and only let storage to keep costing you ...

There is, and it would cause an outage while still not achieving the supposed goal of not going over budget. You don't want to be killing your customer's production over potential misconfigurations/forgotten budgets. Especially when you'd continue to bill them for the storage and other static things like IPs.

It's so much easier for them to have support wave accidental overuses.

If only we had the technology to exempt storage from spending limits.

As if that would solve anything? Depending on use, storage could be the largest line item (storage across databases, VMs, object storage).

I've heard that Google keeps Google Drive data around for up to two years if your subscription expired and your account is over quota. They could certainly do the same with other cloud storage.

If I reduce my gdrive subscription they don’t simply delete what I have over the new (lower) limit. There is a grace period and it’s standard practice. Why should it be any different in this case?

Or do what every other industry does, and trigger a conversation. Or even don't let you store more, or restrict access. Why the need to delete?

'By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?'

>By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?

Why does my AWS counselor sound British. Am I in eu-west-2?

Why shouldn't it, its just a machine? Wouldn't the world be better if these messages varied a bit!

That's what alarms that you set up are for.

It is worth noting that both products have had "student" tiers or similar, that had fixed credit limits with a cliff.

Therefore, they've implemented hard-limits. So not offering hard-limits is a business decision, NOT a technical one. They're essentially hiding functionality they have.

Make of that as you will. Anyone justifying it, should be me with skepticism.

I have never heard of nor seen AWS student accounts.

There is a free tier but that varies per service and anyway will not limit anything. It works as if it just gives you some credit to offset the costs.

AWS Educate "Starter" Accounts were exactly that[0]. It didn't ask for, nor need a Credit Card, and there was functionally no way to exceed.

[0] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/cloud-computing/aws-educate-st...

They also offered (may still offer) the same thing with AWS Academy.

Soft limits would be ideal (x/day with maximum peak of x/minute), but hey, that's literally negative value to them (work to code, CPU time to implement, less income out of "mistakes")

not really no

you can set up a cloud function to monitor billing limits and automatically disable billing for a project if it exceeds the limits though

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