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. Anon1096 · 1791080413 · focus · HN ↗

      It's one part technical, one part a product decision. The technical part is that billing is not actually instant. As a most basic example, a VM reports its billing units every X period of time it is active. If there is some network blip but it's still running, then that billing data could be delayed.

      The product level decision is that "shut down everything" is something the customers you want to target don't actually want. Are we including deleting RDS data? S3? Glacier storage? If so then the headline will just change from "Hobbyist got charged XXXXXX on AWS" to "Business literally had all their data deleted because a hacker took over their VM and mined bitcoin". The only people who really want this are hobbyists and it's not a market segment that's worth chasing. Easier to do the status quo of forgive afterwards then even open the can of worms of deleting all of a business's data and all their backups just because they had a 100k overrun.

      1. cj · 1791082098 · focus · HN ↗

         > The only people who really want this are hobbyists and it's not a market segment that's worth chasing. Easier to do the status quo of forgive afterwards then even open the can of worms of deleting all of a business's data and all their backups

         Hit the nail on the head.

         Nearly all businesses would prefer a cost overrun than services going offline.

         1. fcarraldo · 1791087405 · focus · HN ↗

            yeah, I don’t know why anyone thinks otherwise.

            for personal/hobby accounts sure. for a business, it’s much better to negotiate around billing or adjust systems/processes post-facto than it is to have service cut off unexpectedly.

            debts are easier to manage when you have an active (ideally growing) customer base. you don’t have customers anymore if your cloud account takes down your service for the rest of the month due to spending limits.

            1. necovek · 1791088094 · focus · HN ↗

               If you are actually a business, a common warning that you are near the limit should mostly resolve it. It might only be tricky because the estimated time remaining is really short if it's a huge recent spike: eg. nobody is looking forward to a notice of "you'll use up your spending limit in 4h" on the weekend.

               This type of warning should give you enough time to investigate if the warning is real and adjust the spending limits.

               But then again, even if you hit them and your services get paused, you'd be increasing the spending limits and restoring services after you are back at work and notice they are down, so it mostly comes down to your incident response times.

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