Thread

1. motionlessveloc · 1791082849 · focus · HN ↗

   I used to work on a support team of a well known backend type service that had hard budget caps.

   It was, unfortunately, a nightmare. There were tons of tickets and even threats of lawsuits from customers whose service got cut off hard at the worst possible time due to organic growth/going viral/big event/nobody knew about the limit/etc. Not only did they lose all the leads and revenue they would have gotten from that bump, but they also pissed off their own existing users who suddenly couldn't use the service either.

   Generally speaking, it's much better to use alerts instead of hard limit. Even in the worst case (hackers pwn your credentials and mine Bitcoin or whatever) the rest of your business is unaffected and you can negotiate with the billing department at comparative leisure.

   This is all assuming you have humans operating the service. If you're letting AI agents yolo infra in prod, you have a whole series of new problems.

   1. spoonyvoid7 · 1791084415 · focus · HN ↗

      > you can negotiate with the billing department at comparative leisure.

      I'm curious. How likely is the billing department to waive off a huge bill as bad debt because an inexperienced builder misconfigured their infra or was hacked?

      1. reticulates · 1791084942 · focus · HN ↗

         Not the OP but run a high margin service that has customers run up accidental bills often. Customers running up bills intentionally and then not paying is even more common. There is almost no situation where trying to force a customer to pay makes sense, we write off any amount without question. The goodwill is worth it every time. Most SaaS companies don’t even have the processes in place for debt collection anyway.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.