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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

The alternate conversation is "the new report run had a bug and cost us $1,000,000 over the weekend" and I think that one's usually worse.

But one could just have two categories of service - the default capped plan, and a special Enterprise one where you sign a contract making it clear you understand the consequences of not having a budget limit.

Also, if your average usage is $900, set your hard limit at $2,000, not $1,000. Then when the report runs $500 over expected, you get a soft limit email and still have your report. Even a "business critical" run is probably not actually worth more than double your average spend.

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Even if you set your cap at $10,000 it would be better than nothing.

The price cap should be the number you’d be willing to spend to avoid an outage vs when you’d rather kill everything and work out what happened.

This is the right perspective, but the folks who would be setting this cap for the customers that matter likely have no idea how to price that, or the price would be so absurd as to make the cap meaningless.

How much would a hospital pay to avoid unexpected downtime of their software systems?

I would think once you reach the scale that this becomes an issue you can afford someone or a team to be monitoring the system 24/7 able to respond to a price spike.

Price caps are for small scale stuff where you wake up on Monday and see 1000x the normal bill.

I imagine that the product folks at places like AWS are averse to introducing discontinuities in the experience based on scale. Little customers get the same experience as big customers who get the same experience as mega customers.

Obviously they’ve changed their mind about cost management in light of the scale and dynamism of agents, which isn’t too surprising.

A hospital needs to be able to handle a full cloud outage. So I'd be worried if they're near the top of the list of how much they'd be willing to pay here.

A hospital should select the checkbox that says "no spending limit".

No, hospital should be able to work offline.

And presumably getting bill for bajillion dollars would be bad also for them.

Sure, but prior to AWS introducing a notion of “project”, then they’d be at risk for those $1M bills from the data science team looking for agentic magic to reduce readmissions.

My point is this was never as simple as, “Give me a dial to set my maximum account spend.”

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