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. KronisLV · 1791110526 · focus · HN ↗

      > Generally speaking, it's much better to use alerts instead of hard limit.

      Probably for companies and opportunistic individuals with a high risk tolerance. As for me, just give me hard budget caps. It shouldn't be a choice between supporting one of the approaches, when you could let each client pick what they want.

      Want an alert? Configure one.

      Want a hard limit? Configure one.

      (just make the configuration easy and visible)

      1. edoceo · 1791137729 · focus · HN ↗

         The thing I see is folk putting a limit when given the choice. Later the situation changes, they want mega scale. Then don't fiddle the settings. I think it's a documentation & process problem.

         1000 years ago, before CI/CD took over folk would have launch/go-live events, where teams would do a good checklist. There were pre-launch meetings to review, which included load checking.

         1. 486sx33 · 1791138200 · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

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