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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: if you can automate API calls on the client side, why can't you automate billing caps? If you want a machine that can run 24-7 and make money for you while you sleep (which let's face it is the motivation for a lot of AI takeup), isn't the onus on you to install cicuit-breakers?

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Because many cloud services have incredibly complex or opaque pricing structures that make it difficult to impossible to determine how much something is going to cost you ahead of time, especially if it's usage-based a la network egress (and the usage statistics don't update frequently enough to make such circuit breakers possible to implement client-side).

I would just not sign up for a service without price transparency, or pre-calculate my liability based on available information before pushing the (metaphorical) Deliver Now button.

Sometimes the invisible hand of the market needs to be paired with a good swift legislative kick in the ass to speed things up a little.

Making incredibly complex and opaque pricing structures is not necessary for the providers to charge for and make a profit on their service. And being technically difficult is a lazy excuse. Cloud platforms have to solve many, much more difficult challenges to offer their services at all, they just don’t want to invest the time in more customer friendly billing because they expect it will result in reduced revenues.

I know your post isn’t explicitly defending the platforms, but the arguments they use feel transparently flimsy.

They might not be able to predict your bill but how much time do they need to add up what you already spent to minimize your overage? And TBH how much time should be acceptable to exceed your cap before it's their fault for the lag in their software.

Stop making excuses for the cloud providers. They build these on purpose, for that purpose, working as intended.

I'm not sure where you got the impression that I'm making excuses for cloud providers. I'm just stating the way things are, not the way I think they should be.

Last time I checked it was impossible to get relevant info from API, for example for AWS.

Or if there was info that was after potentially horrible expensive operation.

That was blocking automated checking.

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