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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

Can you pre-load money into your account and have that be used until it's zero, at which time you have to load more? Deepseek does it this way.

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There's a brand-new, Gemini-specific feature for that (as new as March 23), but historically the answer has tended to be "no" from all the cloud providers. Most giants and indies alike have always been strongly opposed to implementing this feature for business reasons. (When you run across something that does let you do things that way, it's one of a handful of exceptions.) Their response is to tell you to set up budget alerts, which is not a solution, as described in this post.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...>

No. I believe all major cloud providers are Pay As You Go. I think only Azure has a tier where you can run on free credits for a while.

The only thing I've seen is in MECM (SCCM) the azure extension will hard shut down when you hit a limit. if you want.

Google doesn't allow disconnecting credit card from account unless you close it. That includes situation when you are just trying out free tier.

Does Google allow a privacy card that you can control whether an account is connected to it or not? That wouldn't help if someone racked up a ton of charges and Google bills daily, though.

A failure to pay does not extinguish the underlying debt owed. While the US seems pretty dysfunctional (or customer friendly, depending on how you see it) when it comes to collecting on debts, this is not the case globally.

And even in the US, you could presumably easily find all your Google accounts (including personal ones) locked until you pay the outstanding sum. Not something I'd risk, personally.

I doubt most cloud providers are even technically ready for true prepaid billing (which requires things such as estimating and reserving funds prior to paid operations, corresponding real-time two-way interfaces instead of just eventually consistent billing event aggregation etc).

In early mobile networks, the feature set for prepaid used to always lag behind, since real-time billing wasn't really a design consideration from the beginning.

I suppose rather than taking on that extra work or offering a reduced feature set or by building something best-effort and taking financial responsibility for its failures, if cloud providers can just get away with making this the user's problem, why wouldn't they?

> When your Prepay credit balance on the billing account hits $0, all API keys in all projects linked to that billing account will stop working simultaneously. Prepay credits apply only to Gemini API usage costs; you can't use them to pay for other Google Cloud services.