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. reticulates · 1791084259 · focus · HN ↗

      Yes, this is an important point although it has changed with A.I. Software is traditionally very high margin and so a $10k bill can be written off by the provider without any meaningful loss.

      As a customer, the big number is scary and causes panic but for the provider… customers constantly fail to pay bills, providers are constantly writing off bills because it just isn’t worth the cost to chase, if a customer says “hey that usage was a mistake” it’s usually worth it to write it off to save the relationship. If you write off a big bill that wouldn’t have been paid anyway, the customer will perceive you as wonderful and benevolent and be loyal for life when they are ready to spend their money.

      With tokens though the actual cost being incurred is much, much higher. If your service is just a wrapper around tokens, and a customer incurs $10k of usage that you paid OpenAI $5k for, it becomes much more difficult to write off.

      Google Cloud is one of the few services that actually pursues unpaid bills even on their high margin services.

      1. sandworm101 · 1791111270 · focus · HN ↗

         That will change as data centers become more "compute hubs" than service providers. When a good chunk of your bill is the cost of the electricity the compute center will have little margin to negotiate. Power companies do not care about customer mistakes.

         1. trollbridge · 1791153511 · focus · HN ↗

            Power companies provide meters with real time transparency.

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