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

612 points · 304 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. twoodfin · · focus · HN ↗
      This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

      “Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

      The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

      1. handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
        The alternate conversation is "the new report run had a bug and cost us $1,000,000 over the weekend" and I think that one's usually worse.

        But one could just have two categories of service - the default capped plan, and a special Enterprise one where you sign a contract making it clear you understand the consequences of not having a budget limit.

        Also, if your average usage is $900, set your hard limit at $2,000, not $1,000. Then when the report runs $500 over expected, you get a soft limit email and still have your report. Even a "business critical" run is probably not actually worth more than double your average spend.

        1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
          Even if you set your cap at $10,000 it would be better than nothing.

          The price cap should be the number you’d be willing to spend to avoid an outage vs when you’d rather kill everything and work out what happened.

          1. twoodfin · · focus · HN ↗
            This is the right perspective, but the folks who would be setting this cap for the customers that matter likely have no idea how to price that, or the price would be so absurd as to make the cap meaningless.

            How much would a hospital pay to avoid unexpected downtime of their software systems?

            1. Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
              A hospital needs to be able to handle a full cloud outage. So I'd be worried if they're near the top of the list of how much they'd be willing to pay here.
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