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. kasey_junk · 1791079887 · focus · HN ↗

      Because most enterprise users would much rather have overages in billing than outages. The opportunity costs on any serious service I deploy dwarfs usage pricing, at least at the level a generic cloud can determine.

      So it’s a feature the best customers don’t want, that adds risk to those customers deployments, to appease the worst customers.

      At least historically. Perhaps Simon is right that the calculation has changed.

      1. koolba · 1791080070 · focus · HN ↗

         It’s not a binary decision though. Any sensible enterprise has many AWS accounts. Often hundreds or thousands. It’s the only clear separation of privilege.

         There’s no reason for the majority of them to have an infinite budget cap. Prod? Sure. UAT? Why not. The sandbox environment Johnny just spun up to test some new agentic workflow? Hell no.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.