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. ndsipa_pomu · 1791112534 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't see how it can be a problem if a service has mandatory settings for soft and hard limits. Those who don't want to disrupt services just unset the hard limit. Those who complain after the fact can be pointed at their explicit choices and have them explained to them - the service provider can hardly be held liable for a customer choosing the wrong value when it's easy to set the right value.

      This is not rocket salad to implement correctly.

      1. pixl97 · 1791119779 · focus · HN ↗

         If AI bills are that much higher, and margins are that much lower then I'd expect upsetting hard caps to start requiring credit checks.

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