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We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

606 points · 302 comments · elffjs

  1. joshdavham · · 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. dhosek · · focus · HN ↗
      I had a $.20/month recurring charge from AWS that I could only remove¹ by completely deleting my AWS account. That was enough to get me to give up on AWS for personal projects.

      ⸻

      1. The key word was “I.” Maybe someone more skilled at navigating AWS’s menu structure than I could would have done it quickly and easily, but even though I knew what it was for, turning it off and not getting billed for it turned out to be a huge challenge. Thankfully it was only $.20, but if I were using the service for something that generated actual bills, that $.20 (and possibly more) would end up quietly siphoning money out of my pocket into Amazon’s).

      1. yardstick · · focus · HN ↗
        Sounds familiar. I’m being billed £0.01/month for something in GCP, I don’t know what even after digging, but I’m too fearful to complain about it or disable the account lest it somehow gets my main Gmail account blacklisted somehow.
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