Thread

1. joshdavham · 1791078994 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

   Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

   1. mejutoco · 1791098020 · focus · HN ↗

      > While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision

      Why is egress more expensive than ingress in clouds? To lock in users.

      Why cloudformation in some cases leaves s3 buckets laying around after destroy? To keep charging those cents.

      Why no caps? To get the user into the mindset of we ll pay whatever they say, and charge the ones that dont notice or dont ask for the refund. Same reason why my newspaper subscription autorenews.

      Nothing cynical about both of these. I think assuming it is technical is naive.

      1. toast0 · 1791170361 · focus · HN ↗

         > Why is egress more expensive than ingress in clouds? To lock in users.

         Eh... Bandwidth contracts are almost always billed only in the dominant direction. Very few cloud applications are inbound dominant. There's no need to bill for inbound traffic.

         I personally find the cloud bandwidth prices pretty high, and I assume that's where they make up for difficult to account for costs, but not charging for inbound is totally reasonable.

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