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. mybrowsercache · 1791117928 · focus · HN ↗

      My mobile phone contract reduces my speed a lot when the hard limit it reached. I still get some connectivity. What Never happens is that I have to pay extra. If a company can’t give me hard limits on the cost I have to pay, I will not do business with them. Notifications when close to the limit are fine, but when I don’t react to them I want things to crash rather than having to pay indefinite amounts.

      1. collingreen · 1791125106 · focus · HN ↗

         Isn't that a soft limit? I guess it's a hard limit from the "zero additional cost" perspective but sift from the "stuff still works but in a degraded state" perspective.

         1. oblio · 1791125689 · focus · HN ↗

            AWS and co have basically 0 built in limits, either hard or soft.
         2. bluGill · 1791136389 · focus · HN ↗

            It's indirectly a hard limit. You can calculate at the reduced speed that you're given exactly how much data you can consume after you reach that limit. And there's your true hard limit.

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