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. pixelready · 1791081481 · focus · HN ↗

      If these cloud providers had needed a standard customer acquisition strategy to grow to their current size, hard caps and other “training wheels” features would already be in place to get people interested in and comfortable using the platform, with the hope of eventually getting a foothold into Enterprise like most SaaS startups have to do (“enjoy our product on a side project and then recommend us to your CTO!”). But AWS and GCP got to start as in-house providers for their own constellations of massive sites and back out from that to serving other hyper scale businesses first. The lack of friendly on-ramps and starter account features is a reflection of that origin more than anything.

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