Thread

1. joshdavham · 1791078994 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

   Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

   1. twoodfin · 1791079268 · focus · HN ↗

      This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

      “Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

      The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

      1. simonw · 1791079715 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't really understand that argument. This seems pretty obvious to me, as a customer. Is this really something that companies don't understand?

         Sending an email when your budget gets low shouldn't be a big lift.

         1. kasey_junk · 1791080458 · focus · HN ↗

            Big companies have thousands of budgets. An email is _worthless_. In fact, it would probably cause me to lose faith in a cloud that provided that as the control.
      2. handoflixue · 1791080224 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. Gigachad · 1791081658 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

            1. twoodfin · 1791082400 · focus · HN ↗

               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?

               1. Gigachad · 1791082609 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

                  1. twoodfin · 1791083025 · focus · HN ↗

                     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.

               2. simonw · 1791083159 · focus · HN ↗

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

                  1. twoodfin · 1791083710 · focus · HN ↗

                     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.”

                  2. matkoniecz · 1791097998 · focus · HN ↗

                     No, hospital should be able to work offline.

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

               3. Dylan16807 · 1791088200 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.
      3. cogman10 · 1791080309 · focus · HN ↗

         Counter argument, this is the sort of thing that, especially for a smaller business or individual, can be the difference between a bad night and bankruptcy.

         Sure it sucks that critical services blinked out at 2am. But what sucks even more is finding out the image on my ASG had a vulnerability that allowed someone to install a bunch of bitcoin miners which kept me fully scaled from midnight to 2am.

         Or more likely, that a mistake in terraform 1000xed my spending.

         Most people have predictable spending and could easily say "don't spend more than 10x what I normally spend". Or 1.5x, or 2x, 3x, etc. All depending on how they want to balance a runaway cloud expense.

         1. twoodfin · 1791082263 · focus · HN ↗

            For a large enterprise spending millions on AWS, 1.5X is already a budgetary disaster. Unfortunately, shutting off critical IT infra because it hit 1.4X spend this month is a business disaster.

            There’s no magic wand that produces good outcomes when planning or execution goes awry at scale.

            1. cogman10 · 1791083643 · focus · HN ↗

               > especially for a smaller business or individual, can be the difference between a bad night and bankruptcy.

               Just because this isn't a good solution for everyone, doesn't mean it's not a good solution for a large number of people and businesses.

               A lot of businesses can tolerate outages. In fact, even very big businesses come out mostly unscathed when they have multi-hour outages. (how many is it for github this year?)

               An outage causes a reputational black eye. It does not necessarily translate to lost income.

            2. pixl97 · 1791120603 · focus · HN ↗

               There is a magic wand.

               If you're a big business that wants to spend unlimited money, you apply for unlimited credit with a credit check.

               If you don't, you get hard caps.

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