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. dhosek · 1791081116 · 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. dehrmann · 1791085408 · focus · HN ↗

         It's possible to get billed for things not exposed in the UI. ~10 years ago, I had one of these. A Glacier upload chunk was stuck in a staging area for over a month. I couldn't complete or cancel the upload, or remove the chunk. Support was able to, and they refunded the money without much hassle. But I did have to reach out to support (as a <$100 per month customer) to ask. Glacier was new, so I chalk it up to it being a new product, not anything greedy or malicious.

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