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. mcintyre1994 · 1791113246 · focus · HN ↗

      I can understand how that causes issues, but surely it also shows that alerts don't work either? These companies were presumably missing/ignoring alerts with scary messaging that they're about to get shut off, and would also miss/ignore alerts with scary messaging that their bill is getting too high.

      1. pixl97 · 1791119389 · focus · HN ↗

         Ya, especially on the open internet where the time between the first alert and bankruptcy could be minutes.

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