The Billable Usage API: programmatic cost visibility for Cloudflare

blog.cloudflare.com

54 points·ashleypeacock··9 comments

A while ago, I noticed some very small oscillations in my Cloudflare R2 bill (1-2 cents / month) and decided to ask about it out of curiosity. Support was tepid - understandable for my $1 / month account - and it wasn't until later that I realized the difference probably had to do with the number of days in the month.

Would this API have helped?

seems like you fit the profile of the dude who uncovered a major fraud just due to his habit of checking minor increases/expenses

Office Space level fraud

Not sure if you're thinking of the same story, but this reminds me of Cliff Stoll finding KGB hackers poking around military and university networks in the 80s because of a time billing discrepancy.

His book The Cuckoo's Egg is great!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

Translated: Close, but still not hard cost cap at Cloudflare.

Goes well with every other cloud provider refusing to offer a hard cost cap.

Unless of course you're on their credits then miraculously they do support a hard cap with every service stopping the second you go one cent over.

Vercel does. They don't get enough credit for it.

Zeit is good. Glory to Zeit.

AWS has one. New accounts can pick a Free plan, which has no billing path - when the credits run out or six months pass, the account closes instead of charging you.

Not configurable, though. You still can't tell a production account to stop at $50.

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